12/98 Pig/Issues Prayer in School America. One Nation under God. The United States has a history of supporting freedom of religion. Does this also mean freedom from religion? Does prayer in public schools violate the US Constitution?The most important thing about the discussion of a school prayer amendment is not school prayer as such. People of good sense and religious conviction can disagree about whether there should be prayer in public schools, what kind of prayer and who should be in charge of it. Those decisions should be made by thousands of communities and local school boards across the country. That is called democracy. An amendment is needed not to encourage school prayer but to restore to the people their right and responsibility to decide a question that bears upon the kind of education they want for their children.Parents who are serious about the moral and religious formation of their children should have no illusions that adding a prayer at the beginning of the school day will achieve that goal. Public policy should help such parents send their children to schools that share their educational goals. This means school vouchers, education tax credits, flexible charter schools, or other instruments that can enable parents to exercise real choice in education. Voluntary school prayer is not a constitutionally forbidden "establishment" of religion, unless one believes that government policies that favor religion constitute an establishment of religion. Regrettably, the Supreme Court has at times indicated that it believes just that. The Court has said that, between religion and irreligion, the state must be neutral. Sometimes it has gone further, suggesting that religion, unlike irreligion, poses a threat to society and deserves, at most, legal protection as an individual choice or

private eccentricity. That was not the view of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution, and it is not the view of the overwhelming majority of Americans today. It is the Court that has promulgated an eccentric view of religion, and it is the Constitution that provides the means for preventing the Courtrom imposing that view on the society, namely, a constitutional amendment.There are at present several versions of a proposed amendment, and it is not clear which will be favored by the congressional majority. The best wording for the amendment will be the wording that best addresses the hree concerns noted above. After an amendment is passed and ratified by he states, then the debate about the rightness or wrongness, the prudence or mischief, of school prayer can begin in earnest. Those who want that debate now, whether they are pro or con school prayer, are entirely premature. Having the debate now assumes that this is a question for the federal government to decide. It is not. The debate about the school prayer amendment, then, is not about school prayer. It is about returning to the people a right and responsibility that was arrogantly usurped by an imperial judiciary. It is about the restoration of democratic self-governance. Bibliography http://www.religioustolerance.org/prayer.htmhttp://members.aol.com/larrypahl/prayer1.htmhttp://www.infidels.org/activist/current/church-state/prayer/