Florida Senate Bill 98 Would Allow Graduation Prayers at Public Schools

They never fucking learn!

This bill shouldn’t have pasta’d.

The Supreme Court already decided this is unconstitutional.

“The potential for divisiveness is of particular relevance here though, because it centers around an overt religious exercise in a secondary school environment where, as we discuss below, see infra, at __, subtle coercive pressures exist and where the student had no real alternative which would have allowed her to avoid the fact or appearance of participation.”

“The undeniable fact is that the school district’s supervision and control of a high school graduation ceremony places public pressure, as well as peer pressure, on attending students to stand as a group or, at least, maintain respectful silence during the Invocation and Benediction. This pressure, though subtle and indirect, can be as real as any overt compulsion. Of course, in our culture standing or remaining silent can signify adherence to a view or simple respect for the views of others. And no doubt some persons who have no desire to join a prayer have little objection to standing as a sign of respect for those who do. But for the dissenter of high school age, who has a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow, the injury is no less real. There can be no doubt that for many, if not most, of the students at the graduation, the act of standing or remaining silent was an expression of participation in the Rabbi’s prayer. That was the very point of the religious exercise. It is of little comfort to a dissenter, then, to be told that for her the act of standing or remaining in silence signifies mere respect, rather than participation. What matters is that, given our social conventions, a reasonable dissenter in this milieu could believe that the group exercise signified her own participation or approval of it.”

from Lee v. Weiseman
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1014.ZO.html

[…] the measure is needed to protect the religious freedom of
students, some of whom now feel they aren’t allowed to offer prayers
that the student body, or a large part of it can listen to – that
they’re only allowed to pray to themselves or in small groups.

Jesus F. Christ, FL christians, I know this had already been talked about to death, but doesn’t your own holy book — in the new testament, no less — tells you exactly to pray in private? Read Matthew.Also, even if this bill passes, it is unconstitutional, and can (and probably will!) be challenged in court.

I’m not sure why Christians — who, one would think, ought to follow the teachings of Jesus as he said them — could possibly object to having to pray in private. Jesus specified that all prayers are to be said in private:

When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. (Mt 6:5-6)

I defy any Christian to explain to me how a prayer at a graduation — which is quite public — can possibly be anything other than an affront to Jesus, given what he personally taught (if the gospels are to be believed). I further defy any Christian to explain how praying publicly to a deity who explicitly forbid public prayers is anything other than hypocrisy — which is, itself, something their own Jesus likewise expressly forbid them to engage in (see e.g. Mt 7:5 & Lk 6:42).

Lee v. Weisman (1992) should have put this to rest forever:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=505&invol=577

But the religionists keep chipping away, just like they do on teaching creationism:
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-06-03/us/texas.school.prayer_1_graduation-ceremony-appeals-court-emergency-appeal?_s=PM:US

I don’t know whether the TX case will go before SCOTUS, but let’s hope Obama gets the next  nomination to the High Court.

Jesus does not forbid public prayer – he speaks out against the hypocrisy of the Farisees. The graduates good be guilty of this or they couldn’t.

Yes, but not others who’d rather learn in school than be forced to listen to prayers.

As a person going for a teaching degree in Florida this decision(in spite of my letter and the letters of many other Floridian atheists) upsets me greatly.  I would say please don’t believe that we are this stupid in Florida, but alas, when it comes to the majority population, I cannot.

Of course he forbid public prayer! He complained about the Pharisees, to be sure, but he also made an unconditional and generalized statement about how his followers were to pray.

Look, Jesus is your guy. You can either obey his teachings or not. It’s entirely up to you, and since I’m not a Christian, it’s not my problem. It’s yours. That you can rationalize away obeying him doesn’t mean you’re not disobeying him.

I’d respect Christians more if they would just be honest about what they do. In this case, they should just say, “I know Jesus ordered us not to pray publicly; I’m just choosing to do it anyway.”

But then, if you do that, you leave unanswered the question, “Why profess to follow someone whose teachings you have no intention of obeying?” Unfortunately I can’t answer that for you. I can only wonder what would make you wish to be that sort of hypocrite …

Florida – truly America’s wang! They have their own category on Fark for a reason!

You personally may not be “stupid,” but clearly, your co-religionists are. Now that you know it, what do you plan to do about it? Just let them run around being stupid … and doing unacceptable things in the name of your own religion? Or do you plan to do something about it? Are you going to educate them so they’re not stupid any more? Are you going to confront them about what they’re up to? Block them from doing it somehow? What?

At some point, the “smart” (as opposed to the “stupid”) Christians are going to have to take their own religion back. Christianity belongs as much to the smart Christians as it does to the stupid ones. Unfortunately, one would never know it … because the smart ones sit on their hind ends while the stupid ones abscond with Christianity.

If smart Christians don’t care enough about their own religion to police it, then they have no right to expect outsiders to respect their religion — or them. It’s just that simple.

 “an inspirational message to be delivered by students at a student assembly.”

It’s sounds like free-speech to me. Since when can the students not express their religion on “government grounds”?

I like your idea for your next letter.  We need to write to our representatives, since it already passed in the senate. 

Prayer HA! I’ve never been so disgusted by a so called school prayer given at my child’s high school graduation. The student actually called on them to sway others to seek the truth in Jesus Christ. Which was followed by cheers of the crowd like someone had just scored a touchdown. Then speaking somewhat loudly with my other surprised child next to me about what we just witnessed, many others around us gave looks us that could kill.

I think they’ve truly missed the point of “freedom of religion” if they feel it means it’s necessary to make sure the majority can continue expressing that religion over the objections of everyone else.

“When students are acting as agents of the public school, and
not private individuals, they are agents of the government. It is an issue regarding
the establishment clause when the government, via its agents, expresses
religious attunement.”

It’s hard to decipher what you mean by “Agents”. It doesn’t matter however; for the students are acting as volunteers and still maintain the status of “private individuals”. ( “All prayers of invocation or benediction will be given by student volunteers.”. )
NOT the aforementioned “agents of the government”.

Wrong, the bill states:(a) Students who are responsible for organizing any
 student-led portion of a student assembly shall:
 1. Have sole discretion in determining whether an inspirational message is to be delivered.
 2. Choose the student volunteers who will deliver an inspirational message. The student volunteers shall be solely responsible for the preparation and content of the inspirational message.NOT the majority.

Thou should not have been convinced by this “volunteer” reply; nobody else should either.

Volunteering does not exempt a person from becoming the
agent of another authority (i.e. a person need not be paid to be an agent—being
granted power/authority is enough because agency flows from authority.) The
authority and therefore agency of these students is given to them by the school
officials (as agents of the state) who are providing their
state-granted authority to the students.
School functions are not the private time of the students; they’re the public time of the school! To argue that the students can act as the officials would (in the organization and authority capacity) are still acting as private persons begs incredulity–they’re performing the duties of the officials and during a school function no less.
I think Westley has already covered (repeatedly) why the
above is unconstitional.

Are you saying that the parallel between these guys and the Pharisees is completely lost on you? Standing and praying on street corners so that they may be seen by others? …Nothing?

Nope, that’s not what he said. He directly admitted to the parallel:

He complained about the Pharisees, to be sure

And then made this valid point:

but he also made an unconditional and generalized statement about how his followers were to pray.

How is that valid? Matthew 6:6

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door
and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what
is done in secret, will reward you.

That part is a direct guideline on how to pray and where. Christians will be rewarded for praying, specifically, in secret.

Look, I can’t speak for everybody, but I personally don’t object people
praying in public. It looks silly to me, but whatever: we have plenty of
people engaging in silly stuff all the damn time.

Absolutely! And nobody here is arguing against that. They can worship and pray and prance around in magical underwear all they want and nobody here objects to their right to do that. We’re just saying their religious text tells them not to, and they’re disregarding it.

 If a student volunteered, or if they were appointed by vote or by administration doesn’t really matter. When you have one or several students speaking at a graduation, they’re speaking FOR their class. The WHOLE CLASS.

I am not attending my class’ graduation in May, but if I did, I certainly wouldn’t want someone who is speaking for me, as part of the class, to pray or publicly endorse religion. Those aren’t my values or my views.

Really, those graduation speakers are representatives of the class. Regardless of whether or not you agree that they’re acting as government agents, you can at least agree that they are meant to represent the graduating students. And they’re mostly speaking to the audience, not the kids in gowns.

Just replace “student” with “Sheriff” and you should see the problem here. Students are “agents” of the government when they act on the government’s behalf. In this case the school district, acting through the individual school, is the government.

I think you mis-read her, PsiCop. It appears FormerThumper’s an atheist, not religious anymore (her name, after all, is FORMER Thumper), so the people who are for this law cannot be rightly called “co-religionists” if FT’s not a Christian, good or bad.

Unless I totally misconstrued her parenthetical comment about “other Floridian atheists.”

I may well have misread her, she referred to “we” being this stupid. I construed the “we” as Christians, not Floridians.

In any event, then, my comment would not be directed toward her, but to any “smart” Christians who might wish to disavow their “stupid” co-religionists and try to evade responsibility for them.

In the end, we have the law telling them not to do it, common sense telling them not to do it, even their own holy book telling them not to do it… yet they still proudly do it. I guess I just don’t get it.

The problem isn’t really the prayer, its the invitation.

If a student invites other students to a group prayer, shamanic ritual, harry potter board game or whatever, that’s all fine.

If the government mandates kids go to school and then appoints a school leadership that “invites”/asks everyone to sit together and watch a stage or else miss out on getting a diploma at a graduation ceremony things start getting tricky. If this is done knowing full well classmates are gonna expect each other to show up an celebrate together (a subtle pressure probably much more effective than forcing young people to do anything). Then you get a problem if you also get people to sit trough sectarian religious stuff. Who specifically the government puts on the stage and what specific kind of prayer they ask the crowd to join in on is irrelevant. But, the fact you bring it up and apparently think it is relevant reveals something about you.

The fact that many americans have trouble telling the difference between student prayer and organised school prayer suggest to me they are really invested in this idea that there are evil forces trying to stop innocent christians from praying. You know, instead of just ordinary people who want the tax-funded schools they are paying for and sending their kids to to be equally welcome of all kids without putting them through unwanted proselytizing or unnecessary peer pressure. Back in 2008 only 74% of Floridian adults considered themselves christian, a number that tends to go down a little every year and be lower for young people. (Both facts known to be part of why some people work so hard to try and illegally proselytize in schools)

All the clever legislative language and trickery (Its not god its the “intelligent designer”, its not my decision its the decision of whoever wins the lottery/vote, you cant touch me because look I am hiding behind a student volunteer) does is make it so people don’t have to embarrassingly put in writing which particular religion they want to promote. But that doesn’t matter because promoting *any* religion is banned if the school gets involved, for example by getting students to listen. Technically it might also get religious people who happen to serve jealous gods in trouble if they write down there are many gods and bowing down before any one of them is all equally good… and if you write down people should pray to whoever they like when you actually feel they should only pray to the one true god then you have to ask yourself what kind of witness you are bearing… not that I care about the first one, but you know, just putting it out there. All this trickery does is prove that the people behind this legislative language are disingenuous, it really doesn’t fix the problem of schools promoting a religion.

If you are the first one to bring up that for example technically a Muslim could lead the prayer (Look under your chair: its a prayer rug! You get a prayer rug! you get a prayer rug! everybody gets a prayer rug!!! now shut up and face Mecca) Then all it does is show that legislative cleverness aside you DO in fact care  about which specific religion gets promoted. We know this must be something that is on your mind because you would never come up with such an argument if you asked yourself which arguments would convince us. As atheist, like the supreme court, incidentally, we don’t care one way or the other.

Bottom line: Its not the job of public schools to make people pray.

Being a floridian who attends public school, I think i cried a little.

The students who are organizing the assembly will likely be members of the majority religion, and thus will happily choose volunteers who will be voices of the majority religion… this bill will create a “majority rules” effect even if it is not stated as such

I’m going to convert our kids to Satanism, and send them to school with live animals to sacrifice, in a pentagram, singing the music from the Omen!  “SANCTUS!! DOMINUS!!!”