Free-speech prayer ruling comes with cost

The Supreme Court says public prayer before city council meetings is OK. That’s got to be a victory in the culture wars. But, will people who are deeply religious be happy with the notion of prayer as a form of free speech?

The subject of prayer before governmental meetings wouldn’t be contentious except for one fact: Prayer is occasionally used not to invoke blessings and guidance from the Almighty, but as a weapon to hurt other people.

Governments in Galveston County, Texas, have had problems with this concept.

Perhaps the low point came a few years ago in a lawsuit involving the Santa Fe, Texas, school district. Prayers and instruction were used in a way to ridicule and demean a student who was Jewish. The court also was appalled about things said of Mormon students.

The problem isn’t isolated. It wasn’t long ago you could hear prayers at public meetings across much of rural Texas that were overtly anti-Catholic.

Earlier this month, the court essentially ruled prayers at government meetings are a matter of free speech, meaning that government bodies can’t really edit the content.

If the person saying the prayer before the city council meeting wants to make a sectarian attack on another sect, there’s just nothing the local government can do.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-4 ruling, put it this way: “To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance or criticizing their content after the fact.”

That raises an interesting point: While government can’t criticize the content after the fact, individual citizens sure can.

One of the widely accepted rules of free speech is if you allow some people to say something, you have to allow others to respond. That’s particularly true if you allow people to say something cutting, hurtful or vicious.

And so, if you open a public meeting with a form of free speech that can be construed as hurtful, mean or bigoted, it’s only fair to let people point that out.

If the idea of a chorus of dissenters offering critiques of the content of prayers said at public meetings offends your notion of what prayer is, take that up with the U.S. Supreme Court.

For many religious people, prayer is the expression of a private conscience toward a higher power. That expression is deserving of profound respect and reverence.

Prayer as depicted in this ruling is something else. It’s just another form of free speech, legally in the same category as the kind of thing you hear at the coffee shop or on talk radio.

Profound respect and reverence do not necessarily follow.

— Galveston County Daily News