A California school district is fighting a legal battle to defend opening prayer, arguing it’s perfectly permissible to open meetings by invoking God.
Joel Oster, an attorney for Advocates For Faith & Freedom, told CBN News Chino Valley Unified School District has taken decisive legal action to challenge what it believes to be an outdated injunction from the Ninth Circuit Court preventing the school board from opening with prayer.
According to a press release, Oster and his team have “filed a motion to lift the injunction, seeking to establish a policy that permits invocations prior to school board meetings in accordance with long-standing American traditions.”
Oster explained the background of the case.
“About 10 years ago, a lawsuit was filed against Chino Valley claiming that their practice of opening up a school board meeting with prayer violated the Establishment Clause, and the Ninth Circuit agreed and entered an injunction, and they based that injunction on what is called the Lemon Test,” he said, noting that the so-called Lemon Test is no longer in effect after football coach Joe Kennedy successfully won a battle to pray on the 50-yard line.
He continued, “The Supreme Court has now overturned the Lemon Test and said it’s not good law. It doesn’t respect how the Establishment Clause should be enforced [and] should be interpreted.”
Based on Kennedy’s Supreme Court win in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Oster said Chino Valley is now going to the courts and pushing back on the injunction against prayer, arguing it should be “cast aside” in light of the Lemon Test being tossed.
The attorney explained why he believes it’s perfectly permissible to begin school board meetings with prayer, noting it all comes down to history and legality.
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“Prayer before school board meetings … is something that has been going on in our nation’s history since before the Constitution was even drafted,” he said. “And prayer has … been used to start deliberative bodies for centuries. There’s been a congressional prayer …for as long as there’s been a Congress.”
Ultimately, Oster said it’s improper to tell religious people they’re “not welcome in society,” something some critics see as the tone and tenor of public debate around prayer in the public square. Furthermore, he said there’s something positive and helpful about opening meetings with invocations.
“Whenever you do open up a deliberative session with a prayer, it just helps to bring solemnity,” Oster said. “It helps to bring wisdom to an event, helps to focus people on the task at hand, and, so, for that reason, the Supreme Court has said that prayers are allowed, they are constitutional to open up deliberative body sessions.”
For those who might argue that school boards are different from other government gatherings because they deal with issues impacting children, Oster noted that many other government meetings, including town councils, might also have children present or involved.
He said there’s effectively no difference and that the Supreme Court has ruled there’s no issue with hosting prayer in these venues. With that in mind, the opportunity to pray should be open to all faiths and cannot be “abused to proselytize” or advance only one faith.
“But that’s not what is going on here, nor is that typically what goes on,” he said, noting that “sometimes the prayers are predominantly of one faith because the demographics of the town are predominantly of one way, so it makes sense that the vast majority of prayers would be aligned.”
Oster said Chino Valley is speaking up and refusing to cower, though he noted some school districts do back down from such battles, noting that plaintiffs can sometimes “act like bullies” and threaten. Legal fees alone can be a deterrent to such fights.
Regardless, he believes Chino Valley will be victorious and that the courts will see that opening prayers do not violate the Constitution.
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