Court Affirms School’s Right to Prayer
By Ed Thomas, OneNewsNow.com The ACLU has failed to have opening prayer before school board meetings of the Tangipahoa Parish district of Louisiana declared unconstitutional. A ruling this week by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allows for the prayer and overturns a two-year-old district court opinion barring it.
The Fifth Circuit ruled that the lawsuit — brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of two public school students and their father — failed to show those individuals had standing to file it. Writing for the majority, Chief Judge Edith Jones found that the court record did not show the plaintiffs actually were exposed to the prayers and were “without any proven, concrete injury.”
Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney Mike Johnson argued on behalf of the school district before the full 15-justice panel in May. He says the ACLU pursued the case, and federal district court judge Ginger Berrigan halted the school board’s opening prayers in 2005, despite U.S. Supreme Court precedent in favor of invocations.
“The school board is just like every other deliberative pubic body,” says the ADF attorney. “They should be able to open their meeting with an invocation, and it’s clearly constitutional — as it has always been in this country — for public officials to invoke God’s blessing on our public affairs.”
Johnson says the ruling also makes a welcome dent in the legal tactic frequently used by the ACLU, which files lawsuits from “offended observers” who claim infringement on their First Amendment rights and violation of the Establishment Clause contained therein.
(Source: OneNewsNow.com)
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