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作者：和合 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
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CNN新闻：美最高法院判定，公立学校不得在球赛前公开祷告
Supreme Court says student-led prayer at high school football games
violates First Amendment
In this story:
The school district policy
Details of the majority ruling
The dissent
Previous prayer cases
By Raju Chebium
CNN Interactive Correspondent
June 19, 2000
Web posted at: 6:22 p.m. EDT (2222 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that prayer
does
not belong in public
schools, even if students initiate and lead the prayers.
The court ruled 6-3 in a Texas case that public schools cannot allow
student-led prayer before high school
football games, a decision that reinforces the wall between church and
state erected by the First Amendment.
The ruling came in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Jane Doe, a
case
involving the Sante Fe
Independent School District in Galveston, Texas, which allowed
student-initiated and student-led prayer
to be broadcast over the public address system before high school
football
games.
The central question was whether allowing prayer violates the First
Amendment's establishment clause,
which states that Congress "shall make no law respecting an
establishment
of religion."
"We recognize the important role that public worship plays in many
communities, as well as the sincere
desire to include public prayer as a part of various occasions so as to
mark those occasions' significance,"
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.
"But such religious activity in public schools, as elsewhere, must
comport
with the First Amendment," he added.
The school district policy
Two students and their mothers filed suit in 1995 and were joined by
the
American Civil Liberties Union.
The students, one Mormon and one Catholic, and their mothers were not
named
in court papers.
The 4,000-student southern Texas school district, until 1995, had a
policy
in which students elected student
council chaplains to deliver prayers over the public address system
before
the start of high school football games.
While the lower courts were considering the legal challenge, the school
district adopted a new policy under
which student-led prayer was permitted but not mandated. Students were
asked to vote on whether to
allow prayers and to vote again to select the person to deliver them.
A lower court retooled that policy to allow only non-sectarian,
non-proselytizing prayer. An appeals court
found the modified policy constitutionally invalid. The nation's
highest
court agreed with the appeals court
Monday.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the ruling was a victory for
freedom of religion.
"This decision comes as a welcome relief for the families who were
ostracized and harassed because they
did not care to participate in the majority's choice of prayer," said
Anthony Griffin, an attorney in private
practice in Galveston who argued the case on the ACLU's behalf.
"As the court recognized today, religious belief and expression is
flourishing in our country precisely because
America has avoided the mistakes of the other countries and resisted
the
temptation of the government to
endorse religion," he added.
Steffen Johnson, a private lawyer who belongs to the Christian Legal
Society, said the school district's policy
ran into legal trouble when it was changed in 1995.
The new policy specifically mentioned the word "invocation," said
Johnson,
who wrote a friend-of-the-court
brief supporting the school district.
If the policy had said merely that students could deliver any message,
it
would have passed constitutional
muster, he said.
Students who objected to the pre-1995 policy viewed the new regulation
as
the "old policy in new clothing,"
Johnson said.
"The decision distorts the First Amendment by exhibiting hostility
toward
student speech," said Jay Sekulow,
an attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice, which argued
the
case on behalf of the school district.
"This decision will interject additional confusion into the area of
protected religious expression in the schools.
The opinion blurs the distinction between government speech and private
speech. It is the free speech of the
students that has been censored."
Details of the majority ruling
The high court rejected the argument that the pre-football prayer was
an
example of "private speech" because
the students, not school officials, decided the prayer matter.
But Stevens wrote that the students were able to deliver only religious
messages deemed "appropriate" by the
school district. That meant, he wrote, "that minority candidates will
never
prevail and that their views will be
effectively silenced.
"Even if we regard every high school student's decision to attend a
home
football game as purely voluntary, we
are nevertheless persuaded that the delivery of a pregame prayer has
the
improper effect of coercing those
present to participate in an act of religious worship," he wrote.
The other justices in the majority were Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony
Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader
Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
The dissent
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing a strongly-worded dissenting
opinion, accused the majority of "distorting
existing precedent" to rule that the policy violated the First
Amendment,
which gives the freedom of speech.
"But even more disturbing than its holding is the tone of the Court's
opinion; it bristles with hostility to all things
religious in public life. Neither the holding nor the tone of the
opinion
is faithful to the meaning of the
Establishment Clause," Rehnquist wrote, noting that the nation's first
president, George Washington, himself
had called for a day of "public thanksgiving and prayer."
Rehnquist also pointed out that the Santa Fe policy allowed students to
discuss purely secular topics, not just
prayer, though he acknowledged prayer would be the topic of choice nine
times out of 10. He said the choice
of topics and speakers was to be made by the students, not the school.
"The students may have chosen a speaker according to wholly secular
criteria -- like good public speaking skills
or social popularity -- and the student speaker may have chosen, on her
own
accord, to deliver a religious message.
Such an application of the policy would likely pass constitutional
muster,"
he wrote.
Joining him in the dissent were justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin
Scalia.
Previous prayer cases
The current Supreme Court has been steadfast in its objection to large
prayer ceremonies in government-funded
schools.
In the 1992 Lee v. Weisman case, the court said no to a rabbi's prayer
at a
public middle school.
The next year, the Supreme Court refused to hear the Jones v. Clear
Creek
Independent School District case,
in which the lower court allowed "non-sectarian, non-proselytizing,
student-initiated, student-led" prayers at
graduation ceremonies.
The Santa Fe case was filed to challenge both the Supreme Court's
decision
to reject the Jones case and to
void the Santa Fe district's policy.
In 1962, the Supreme Court said school sponsored prayer or religious
statments violate the First Amendment.
A year later the court banned state-sponsored reciting of the Lord's
Prayer
and reading of the Bible as part of
devotional exercises in public schools.
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作者：和合 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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