Thanks for your interest in the issue and your input is helpful.

It is sad that it is not intuitively obvious to many that prayers at governmental functions are problematic. No matter what the current state of constitutional law is, it bothers me that some don’t see the unfairness of it, nevermind the uselessness of it. I would love to see the video of a public official who claimed a divine inspiration for their views on taxes, zoning, or school expenditures and challenged us to refute a god’s will. Do our local boards and commissions really expect us to think their decisions are divinely sanctioned because they said a prayer for guidance before meetings?

These prayers are clearly against the spirit of the Constitution as Madison himself stated when writing about prayers in Congress. The fact that pious individuals can ignore that and make a tradition out of the exclusion of others does not give it weight. This is not a matter of Christians being persecuted as some might (and love to) perceive it. No doubt local Christians would cringe at the thought of Allah being invoked for guidance on the wisdom of street construction. Does anyone see the nonsense…and the hypocrisy in that objection?

Sadly, this lawsuit needs to be brought. Rational people, whether called atheists, skeptics, freethinkers, or whatever, just can’t stay quiet when the status quo is a governmental genuflection to what we see as nonsense. Compare it to the situation where you are the only one in Salem who doesn’t believe in witchcraft and the rest of the town is incensed that you are challenging their attempts to save themselves from witches and appease some god by praying at civil meetings…or burning witches. What do you do? Just wait until the prayers are over before you enter the meeting…and thereby label yourself as the enemy of all they believe? Do you try to inject some sanity in the proceedings? Everyone knows that beating a drum and sacrificing a lamb works better for divine guidance, don’t they? Come to think of it, I don’t know why the sun still comes up after the Mayans stopped sacrificing enemy warriors on the alter. To be sure, I am glad that Polk county is not a majority of Mayans of the previous mindset. This little rant would be particularly annoying in that case, I’m sure.