All or nothing

Silence would be better than ACLU's idea of prayer before City Council meetings.

Date published: 10/4/2004

Those who would have Councilman Turner pray should be ready for any kind of prayer

WHEN CONGRESS a few years back debated legislation opening up the nation's public-school facilities for after- hours use by religious groups, several conservative Republican members from California surprisingly balked. They worried that wacko cults, for which the Golden State is noted, would use third-grade classrooms to perform bizarre rituals.

"Bizarre," of course, exists within a cultural context. If a group met on school property to drink the blood and eat the flesh of what they considered a deity, that group would very possibly beRoman Catholics, America's largest Christian denomination, who celebrate Mass under the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Commenting on the question of whether Fredericksburg City Councilman Hashmel Turner should be able to say "Jesus Christ" at the end of his periodic invocations at council meetings, as part of an "open door" policy including representatives of various faith groups, City Attorney Kathleen Dooley cautioned: "The problem with inviting people in is deciding who or what's going to be considered a legitimate religion. If you have a religion of me and my seven cats, are you going to tell them they can't speak?"

Most likely, nothing as outre as Ms. Dooley's hypothetical case would occur (cats only think they rate veneration). Congress went on to pass the open-access legislation referenced above and--guess what!--there were no reports of San Francisco school janitors having to wipe up chalk pentagrams from devil-summoning sessions.

But the city attorney's larger point is sound: Anyone who believes Councilman Turner should be able to reference the Christian Messiah must be willing to abide Muslim, Buddhist, or Sikh invocations, too. And perhaps all sectarian speakers will agree that silence is preferable to mouthing the deistic mush that the ACLU would establish as the official prayer.

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Date published: 10/4/2004