No ‘Jesus’ Prayers Allowed for Indiana House of Representatives
Posted on December 30, 2005
Via WND
U.S. District Judge David Hamilton rejected a request by Republican House Speaker Brian Bosma to review the original Nov. 30 ruling. Bosma claimed the directive was too vague to enforce. Ruling on a suit brought by the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, Hamilton said that “using Christ’s name or title” or referring to a “savior” amounted to a state endorsement of religion.
Opponents of the judge’s action plan to appeal to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.
The Indianapolis star reported Hamilton issued a warning yesterday:
“If the speaker or those offering prayers seek to evade the injunction through indirect but well understood expressions of specifically Christian beliefs, the audience, the public and the court will be able to see what is happening. In that unlikely event, the court will be able to take appropriate measures to enforce” the injunction.
The judge ruled that having a predominance of Christian prayers in the state House illegally advanced one religion over all others. Prayers are normally offered by visiting members of the clergy; when one is not present, a lawmaker says the opening prayer.
“[O]fficial prayers that endorse Christianity in general violate the Establishment Clause,” Hamilton stated yesterday.
“The forces that want to take religious faith out of our government and our society are nibbling away at our liberty,” Bosma said after the original ruling. “They got a big bite with this one. We have done nothing different here than what’s happened for 188 years.”
The Indianapolis Star’s editorial board opined Dec. 2: “Hamilton was terribly intolerant of those Christians who believe that their faith instructs them to pray in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Bosma says he’s prepared to take this all the way to the Supreme Court if it is needed. The ACLU have succeeded in twisting the First Amendment in the judicial branch’s minds to the point it violates itself. Whatever happened to the part of the First Amendment that spoke of our freedom of expression not being prohibited?
» Filed Under 1st Amendment, ACLU, Church And State, News
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7 Responses to “No ‘Jesus’ Prayers Allowed for Indiana House of Representatives”
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I guess this Judge missed the part where it says Congress shall make no law establishing religion. Was Congress making a law? The Amendment does not say the government may not mention religion.
I imagine if some cleric came in and prayed to a gold ram or something that would be OK….
Well, liberal judges are at it again.
“An Indiana federal judge yesterday reaffirmed his decision to forbid prayers to be offered that use Jesus’ name in the state House of Representatives.”
Liberal judges just cannot stand to see Christian observances any place. I think Americans should elect all judges. Then, let the Anti-Christian judges stand on their record of being Anti-Christian. I venture to say that most liberal judges would not be so quick to rule against Christian observances.
To claim I have no right to speak the name ‘Jesus’ is the same as the ruling that ’seperate but equal’ was a good thing. I did not agree with that, and I do not agree with this.
DO NOT ‘misunderestimate’ the Christians in this country. We are good hearted, and we don’t like to fight…much.
When you start infringing on us, well, you’ve bought yourself a fight. We remember the Holocaust. Do you?
I don’t remember seeing in the Constitution where we had freedom of religion unless we get elected.
“DO NOT ‘misunderestimate’ the Christians in this country.”
Misunderestimate? Maybe you could stack a few more extraneous prefixes in there and come up with a really special word, e.g., “exdeprodisconmisunderestimate.”
Regardless, you’ve certainly illustrated one of the reasons Christians are widely perceived as uneducated bumpkins, and you and your fellow snivelers make it abundantly clear that either won’t accept or cannot figure out something the nation’s founders understood well: that regardless of America’s preponderance of Jesus-ites, religion is *not* tantamount to Christianity. Period. Kudos to David Hamilton for not kowtowing to the innumerable backward persons in Indiana and ruling correctly.
“misunderestimate” is a neologism by President George W. Bush, and it’s preponderance is a passive attempt to overwhelm the ridicule of the president over it’s coinage. I actually like the word, and use it when I wish to appear coyly uneducated while making an argument.
But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, the Establishment clause is more general than just the first amendment because it’ really about individual rights, not the strict wording of the Constitution. Congress should not be getting together in session to pray to God, because this is alienating to the millions of Americans who do not believe in the Jewish God, as is their right. I have a right to not have my government representatives take up time to pledge allegiance to some weird tiki god the same as a Buddhist doesn’t have to put up with this. This is a citizen government, and congressmen don’t have a right to make anyone feel unwelcome by interjecting their personal faith into public proceedings.
Turning it around and saying non-Christians were being insensitive is not valid. If a group of Christian congressmen want to get together and pray, no one is stopping them, but please not on the public’s dime.
To me, it comes down to this: You get a certain value from your government based on the taxes you pay. To some extent, you don’t get what you pay for when the government pushes laws or values you don’t agree with. This is just going to happen in representative government. for example, I hate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Education Association. I wish I didn’t have to pay for their perpetuation, but the majority of citizens through their elected officials continue to support these programs. The reason this is acceptable is because public policy has been created out of values that are able to be extrapolated into public policy. It is a supportable, defensible position with strong public support.
The difference with things like congressional prayer time and faith-based funding is, these are based on personal and not public policy values, and putting them into government is by nature oppressive to the personal values of people who do not share them. Again, this is different from public policy because frankly, you can disagree about policy issues but you can’t disagree about religion. What’s good for me maybe isn’t good for you when it comes to religion, and I can’t explain why. That’s why we don’t go around ramming it down people’s throats in the first place. And in the case of government, my taxes are essentially being stolen to alienate me when the government spends time and money on their pet beliefs.
Wrong. You do not have the rights you described here, and the only way to interpret the Constitution the way you are describing is to add to it what wasn’t there to begin with. The wording of the Constitution as obviously allowed Congressional prayer of this kind since they’ve been doing it ever since it was written. You’ll have to give valid evidence that this alienates anybody. Show me who was excluded from these proceedings because they weren’t Christian. If they are offended or uncomfortable, that is there problem. No where in our Constitution does it say we have the right not to be offended, nor does it say we have the right to not be uncomfortable, nor does it say anywhere that it is the government’s responsibility to protect us from these things. In any case, eliminating prayer from Congress may alienate Christians and make them feel uncomfortable. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.