Indiana School Board Gets Rid of Opening Prayers After Warning from Atheists

[NeoGreen]

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/03/18/indiana-school-board-gets-rid-of-opening-prayers-after-warning-from-atheists/

Indiana School Board Gets Rid of Opening Prayers After Warning from Atheists
By Hemant Mehta, March 18, 2021

For reasons that make no sense, the Griffith School Board in Indiana began its meetings with a pastor-led prayer.

Why? Who knows. Did it help the kids? Of course not. Was it illegal? Absolutely.

While invocation prayers that are open to all are permitted at city council meetings, those rules don’t apply to school boards. That’s what the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s legal fellow Joseph McDonald tried to explain in a warning letter to School Board President Kathy Ruesken last month.

We write to urge the Board to voluntarily cease opening its meetings with prayer. Ending this practice would create a more welcoming environment for the community’s minority religious and nonreligious members. At the very least, the Board should revise its prayer practice. Replacing the prayer practice with a moment of silence would allow the Board’s meetings to come to order without ostracizing a significant portion of those in attendance.

In its current form, the Board’s prayer practice needlessly exposes the school district to legal liability while also ostracizing members of your community. Calling upon Board members, district employees, parents, students, and members of the public to pray is unnecessary and divisive…

That’s a very polite way to say the district could easily be sued into oblivion over this.

And guess what? It worked.

The board will now replace the prayer with a moment of silence:

“It was considered indoctrination of young people into a certain religion,” board attorney Joe Svetanoff said.

Worth repeating: It was considered indoctrination of young people into a certain religion.

[twodogsbarking]

1. Freedom from religion

Sounds like a good idea.

[lagomorph777]

4. It's Ron Reagan's foundation. He does great TV ads.

"Not afraid of burning in Hell."

[twodogsbarking]

6. I think I will join

Thanks.

BY ROBERT FROST

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

[NurseJackie]

8. Those ads were great... here's one:

[A HERETIC I AM]

14. It's not his foundation. It predates his interest by quite a while

Perhaps you are confusing his enthusiastic TV ads to mean he was a founder. He wasn’t, not by any stretch.

The FFRF has been around since 1978, when Ron Reagan was 20. It is by no means his foundation.
https://ffrf.org/about/getting-acquainted

[lagomorph777]

15. Thanks for the edification!

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[Ligyron]

3. We constantly play Wack a Mole with Xians.

Knock one down and another pops up even though it's well known that appealing to supernatural forces by government entities is illegal in most instances. Maybe many figure they're too small and isolated to even be noticed.

[Ferrets are Cool]

5. K and R

[mountain grammy]

7. K & R

The establishment clause is in serious danger with the current Supreme Court several of whom would see this move as an assault on their religion.

The Supreme Court declined to hear her case, but that’s not why it’s back in the news. A statement issued by Justice Clarence Thomas and joined by Justice Samuel Alito accompanying the rejection is making headlines. While agreeing with the denial to hear this case, Thomas took the opportunity to bash the Court’s Obergefell ruling as “ruinous” to religious liberty. “Due to Obergefell,” he wrote, “those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society…”

From this article: https://bjconline.org/statement-from-justices-thomas-and-alito-on-religious-liberty-and-same-sex-marriage-100820/

[BobTheSubgenius]

11. Have you considered, Justice Thomas, that perhaps society can get along fine without them?

"Society" isn't a monolith with a central brain in control. It's a collection of many and varied forces, many moving in the same general direction, many completely opposed. There are even forces that overlap others, or push one direction while pulling in another.

The end result is more like a glacial track, and not a luge course. Adapt, die, or create your own little niche in which you hole up with like-minded others until you fall out through attrition.

[Wounded Bear]

9. Without freedom from religion, there is no real freedom of religion...nt

[wnylib]

10. I was 13 when the SC ruled against mandatory

prayer and Bible reading in public schools. I lived in Pennsylvania then, where state law had required teachers to read a chapter from the Protestant King James Bible at the start of each school day. Catholics as well as atheists objected.

The pastor of our Protestant church gave a sermon the next Sunday in support of the SC ruling. He said it was not the responsibility of government run schools to teach religion, and parents and churches should not shirk that responsibility onto schools and government or they could lose their own religious freedoms. He gave the Catholic versus Protestant versions of the Bible as one example, among others. He also emphasized that belief cannot be forced and that attempts to force it are contrary to basic Christian teachings about how people come to faith.

I never understood the notion that you could or should force people to religion and at the same time claim to believe in religious freedom. Totally contradictory.

[Warpy]

12. Conspicuous Christians have been screaming bloody murder about it ever since

because of course when there was forced Protestant prayer and bible study in the schools, the children were perfect little angels and there were no behavior problems and no bullies and most of all, no s-e-x.

Idiots, all.

[wnylib]

13. Sounds like they are admitting

(however inadvertently) that they failed in teaching.the values at home that they wanted their children to have.