on Friday upheld a district court’s ban on prayers by clergy that
may mention a particular deity prior to public meetings in Forsyth
County, N.C.
The Alliance Defense Fund, a legal alliance of Christian attorneys
and like-minded organizations defending the right of people to freely
live out their faith, is representing the Forsyth County Board of
Commissioners. ADF attorneys point out that the decision of the
lawsuit Joyner v. Forsyth County is in conflict with other
federal court decisions and out of step with the history of
invocations in America.
“America’s founders opened public meetings with prayer.
There’s no reason that today’s public officials should be forced
to censor the prayers of those invited to offer them simply because
secularist groups don’t like people praying according to their own
conscience,” said Mike Johnson, an ADF-allied attorney and founding
dean of Louisiana College’s Pressler School of Law, who argued
before the 4th Circuit in May. “The legal team will confer with the
county about the process of appealing [Friday’s] decision.”
Judge Paul V. Niemeyer strongly dissented from the ruling, writing
that “the majority has dared to step in and regulate the language
of prayer—the sacred dialogue between humankind and God. Such a
decision treats prayer agnostically; reduces it to civil nicety;
hardly accommodates the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in Marsh
v. Chambers … and creates a circuit split [with the 11th
Circuit]. … Most frightfully, it will require secular legislative
and judicial bodies to evaluate and parse particular religious
prayers under an array of criteria.
“I respectfully submit that we must maintain a sacred respect of
each religion, and when a group of citizens comes together, as does
the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners, and manifests that sacred
respect—allowing the prayers of each to be spoken in the
religion’s own voice—we must be glad to let it be.”
Other federal courts have upheld the ADF model invocation policy
on which the county’s policy is based. The most recent example is a
July 11 decision that upheld the invocation policy of Lancaster,
Calif. Each of the four other federal courts to review similar
invocation policies since 2009 has found them to be constitutional.
“Finding the county’s policy unconstitutional is odd not only
in light of current cases, but also in light of the many prayers at
public meetings throughout American history that have been uttered
consistent with the prayer-giver’s conscience and without judicial
‘tests’ and government rules,” said ADF Senior Counsel Brett
Harvey.
Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans
United for Separation of Church and State sued the Forsyth County
Commission on behalf of three individuals in March 2007 because it
“does not have a policy which discourages or prohibits those whom
[the board] has invited to deliver prayers from including references
to Jesus Christ, or any other sectarian deity, as part of their
prayers.”
Harvey argues: “In other words, the ACLU and AU are advocating
censorship.”
