The Supreme Court’s decision to hear a case involving the constitutionality of religious prayers at public high school graduation ceremonies has drawn a strong protest from the American Jewish Congress, which believes they should be banned.
The high court accepted a petition Monday, Lee vs. Weisman, that urges the court to scale back its 1962 Lemon vs. Kurtzman ruling banning organized prayer in public schools.
Oral arguments will not be heard until the court’s next term, which begins in October.
The case involves a high school in Providence, R.I., where a prayer offering thanks to God and asking God’s blessing was delivered by a rabbi during a 1989 graduation ceremony.
The family of a graduating student, Deborah Weisman, contested the prayer on the basis that its recitation in a public school violated the separation between church and state as interpreted in the First Amendment.
Last year, a federal district court and later a U.S. appeals court ruled that the prayer was unconstitutional in that it had the effect of advancing religion. AJCongress filed friend-of-the-court briefs in both of those cases on behalf of Weisman and will do so before the Supreme Court as well.
The Bush administration, in filing a friend-of-the-court brief last month on the school’s behalf, argued that unlike organized prayer in schools, graduation prayers occur once a year and take place in the presence of “families as a whole,” which serve as a “natural bulwark against any coercion.”
But in a statement released Monday, AJCongress said, “We are at a loss to understand why the Department of Justice thinks that a junior high school student who wishes to attend her own graduation, but not to participate in a government-sponsored prayer, is not ‘coerced’ into doing so.”
Saying that “these are ominous times for all who treasure religious liberty,” the group expressed disappointment that the Supreme Court “has agreed to reopen another area of the First Amendment which was long settled — that officially sponsored prayers in public schools are inconsistent with the separation of church and state mandated by the First Amendment of the Constitution.”
Many Jewish groups argue that any lowering of the wall between church and state in this or any other instance could open the floodgate for greater government entanglement with religion.
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