For me, this was a fascinating opinion. It is a Federal District Court decision from the South Carolina District concerning graduation prayers in the Greenville County School district. The case is American Humanist Association v. South Carolina Department of Education (D SC, May 18, 2015).
The facts behind the case were that many of the elementary schools in the district, for graduation, chose a a couple of fifth grade students to deliver an opening and closing prayer. In practice, these were almost always Christian. School officials reviewed each prayer beforehand. The American Humanist Association filed a lawsuit against the District claiming that the practice was unconstitutional. The school appears to have agreed, and changed the policy while the case was ongoing. The did away with choosing opening and closing prayers. Instead, the process is now that, any student who is speaking for other reasons (academics, other special awards), that student may choose the content of their speech, whether it be a prayer, a religious message, a secular message, or, one assumes, a summary of the tenants of the American Humanist Association.
What I appreciate about the judge’s written opinion was that it avoided puppeting the usual legal language in such cases (regardless of which way any judge rules on these cases). Instead, Judge Bruce Howe Hendricks gave careful
and intelligent assessment (historically, legally, and culturally) of the difficulties of these issues. Rather than papering over the complexity with legal jargon and politico-legal jargon, his opinion is a careful jurisprudential analysis of the difficulties of such hard cases, where principles more than precedent are at issue (I’d like to think Ronald Dworkin would be proud.) A taste of some of his writing:
…there is no more sacred liberty than an individual’s personal view of his or her cosmological origin – divine or chance, intentional or naturally selective. …meditation and pilgrimage. Namaste. Surfing. Fly fishing. Science. The citizens of this country have the privilege of electing between the innumerable alternatives in religious practice. Our constitution has established but one caveat: “The First Amendment’s Religion Clauses mean that religious beliefs and religious expression are too precious to be either proscribed or prescribed by the State.”
He recognizes that many Christians in his community feel “besieged,” and he discusses why. He recognizes that those of different faiths or no faiths are tired of the historical and widespread insertion of religious language and practice into what ideally adiverse culture. His concern is to think through how a State can allow freedom of religion to individuals while ensuring the State, even benignly, is imposing that religion on someone else? (I have always had a problem with the argument that something violates my rights for because I have to listen to it—if that were the case, the State could say very little to me. But if it is imposing, making me feel pressured, outing me as a non-believer—that it is the crux of the legal rights issue).
The judge writes:
This Court sits in one of the great parts of the world, in people and heritage. There are many in our city and county and State who are the inheritance of a meaningful practice of various religion, maybe Christianity most predominately. Their tenets and freedom to live them matter. But, there is a new and growing richness of population, here, in culture and background, that is transforming the complexion of mores and discourse and daily experience, in both public and private ways. The new practice of the defendant is constitutional. But, plaintiffs are affirmed. Not in their full request for legal remedy but in their aspiration for equal liberty. For too long school districts have cleverly resisted, with every manner of contortion, the force of Establishment jurisprudence to justifiably eliminate all state-sponsored rite. At least one has gotten it exactly right.
He agrees with the way that the school recognized their practices was unconstitutional, and they remedied it—to still allow an individual as an individual to have freedom of expression, while removing their own role in sponsoring and directing it. That to me, at least, seems to capture the spiritual of what the original writers of the Constitution we trying to do.
As always, I urge you to read the opinion itself rather than relying on my reading of it. It is only 21 pages (double-spaced). If you are not used to reading court opinions, some of the terminology may be unfamiliar. But the structure is clear: the background gives you the facts of “how we got here.” Next is the core of the opinion, the “Discussion,” which is the judge’s thoughts about the arguments of both sides, a review and discussion of previous cases that he should consider in making his ruling, and a placing of the controversy in a historical and cultural context. The judge then applies the above discussion to the facts of the case. He reviews some standard ground rules (“tests” in legal langauge) devised by the courts to help decide whether such things are unconstitutional or not: its secular purpose, the primary effect (of the prayer), and entanglement (how or if the prayer “entangles” the defendant into the religion). The judge the summarizes the discussion section by placed this case and the court sitting in judgment on it into the current context of law, history, cultural, and precedent.
Finally, a brief, one paragraph conclusion. (If the terminology is unfamiliar: the AHA (plaintiffs) asked for a “summary judgment,” that is, give us a yes or no whether it was is unconstitutional. The judge granted it for the previous method of prayers (the school choosing and vetting them): it was unconstitutional. But he denied it for the school’s new method: a student who was speaking for other, non-religious reasons could determine the content of his or her own speech—religious or not). Since the school (defendants) had also asked the judge for a summary judgment, it was also granted in part and denied in part (in reverse).
Read the PDF of the opinion here.