WASHINGTON (ABP) — The Supreme Court has declined to hear a challenge to a lower court's ruling that outlawed mealtime prayers at a state-run military college.
The justices turned aside the appeal from Virginia officials April 26. Last year, a three-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Virginia Military Institute's tradition of suppertime invocations, which was reinstated in 1995 after having been discontinued for a few years.
At that time, the majority judges said the unique nature of the military school — which emphasizes “obedience and conformity” — made its situation different than those in other federal cases dealing with prayers at state-supported institutions of higher learning.
Although the Supreme Court has long outlawed government-sponsored prayers at public elementary and secondary school functions, the 6th and 7th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals said in separate 1997 rulings that colleges and universities were different. In those decisions, the appeals courts said state universities could offer “non-denominational” commencement prayers.
Although the justices normally decline cases with no comment, Justice Antonin Scalia released a dissenting opinion blasting the court's majority for their decision. Among the reasons he cited was the alleged conflict on the issue among circuit courts.
“The weighty questions raised by petitioners … deserve this court's attention, particularly since the decisions of two other circuits are in apparent contradiction,” Scalia wrote. Chief Justice William Rehnquist joined Scalia in his dissent.
The three justices generally considered the court's most liberal — John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — issued an even rarer retort to Scalia's dissent, arguing that the court should decline to hear the case mainly on jurisdictional and procedural grounds. However, in their opinion — penned by Stevens — they also touched on constitutional reasons for denying the appeal.
Stevens noted that the 4th Circuit majority acknowledged “in theory” the principle propounded by the 6th and 7th Circuits — that institutions of higher education are different environments than elementary and secondary schools, where students are older and thus less likely to feel coerced into activities led by their educators. Therefore, prayers at some school-related events may not violate the Constitution.
But, Stevens said, the lower court nevertheless found that argument “unhelpful in this case because of the features of VMI that distinguish it from more traditional institutions of higher education.” Stevens said those distinguishing features include VMI's “emphasis on submission and conformity.”
However, Scalia said that reason for the distinction was, “to put it mildly, a frail one.” He went on to say that, in comparing mealtime prayers at state military colleges to commencement prayers at other state universities, “it might be said that the former is more, rather than less, likely to be constitutional, since group prayer before military mess is more traditional than group prayer at ordinary state colleges.”
The case arose when two VMI cadets — Neil Mellen and Paul Knick — sued the school's then-superintendent, Josiah Bunting, over the practice. Cadets marched into the mess hall at mealtime, and a student chaplain said a prayer before the cadets ate. According to the school, the prayers were “non-denominational” and mentioned God but not Jesus or any other deity. Students did not have to recite or listen to the prayers, but were required to maintain respectfully “at rest” during the invocation.
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union represented Mellen and Knick. The cadets have since graduated and Bunting has since retired.
The head of a Washington-based Baptist religious-liberty group hailed the court's decision as an affirmation of proper church-state relations. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, noted that the 4th Circuit is “the most conservative appeals court in the land” but that the panel of judges “understood that coerced prayer violates the principles of religious liberty.
“People of faith understand that coerced prayer is an oxymoron and that for prayer to be prayer, it must be completely voluntary,” Walker continued.
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