When Conservatives are Wrong

A lot has been said about some recent Supreme Court decisions. As plugged in to conservative activists as I am, I've received dozens of commentaries on the recent Supreme Court decision upholding a lower court ruling that a community near Santa Fe, Texas cannot have student-directed prayer before football games. Naturally, the conservatives are outraged. Suppression of church!

I became intrigued by this case when it was mentioned by one commentator that the original case was brought against the school by two families. One Jewish. The other Mormon. Now, for the two of you who may be unaware of this, I'm Mormon. So wondering what could possess a nice Mormon family to press charges against prayer in school, I dug a little deeper into the facts of this case. I mean, they must be nuts or just calling themselves Mormon because religious freedom is actually a stated virtue in LDS tenets.

It turns out that they are, in fact, an active, believing and faithful Mormon family. They just happen to live in a community in Texas where the citizens overwhelmingly belong to a single congregation. This congregation has a pastor who is very much into denouncing other religions. This pastor and his congregation actively worked to express their, um, disapprobation of "sects" and jews.

And the "student-led prayers?" It turns out that the students were using this moment of prayer under direction of their religious leader as a platform to establish themselves as the only acceptable faith and that they were directly attacking other religions (specifically Mormons and Jews) in their 'christian' prayers. And they weren't using terms expressing hope for the salvation of the unbelievers, they were expressing sentiments designed to suppress and denigrate the beliefs of others not of their congregation.

I'm sorry, but I think I'm going to have to side with the Supremes on this one. Not because I'm Mormon and it is a Mormon family who brought the suit (that logic would mean that I'd have to like living in Utah and support Orrin Hatch--not gonna happen). I support the Supremes because I don't want even semi-official sanction of an activity designed specifically to exclude people from an activity based on religious delineations. The actions of these students is a movement by a prominent majority seeking to suppress the people they don't like. These prayers were being crafted with the deliberate intent to show exactly who was in charge and to make sure that the outsiders were fully aware of their pariah status.

A part of protecting freedom means protecting minorities from oppression by an intolerant majority. I think that this case really does speak to the establishment of a religion by the community.