The Star-Ledger, in an editorial, asks a question I’ve been asking for a long time:
Should the Legislature reconsider its policy of having a prayer before the start of a legislative session?
I would have asked it a little differently — rather than “reconsider,” I would have used the word “end.” But that’s quibbling. The editorial raises what I think is an important issue.
And it raising it because of an incident the other day that makes it clear why the opening prayer is a bad idea and why it violates the spirit of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
According to the editorial, the Rev. Vincent Fields, pastor of the Greater Works Ministries in Absecon, was enlisted to open the session when
“the Holy Spirit” led him to speak out against same-sex marriage, an issue that happened to be before the Legislature.
And if that weren’t enough to get some controversy going, he evoked the name of Jesus twice in his prayer. Imagine that, a Christian minister using the name of Jesus.
So the Legislature — apparently shocked — banned him from offering future benedictions.
What is shocking, however, is not that the Rev. Fields went off script or even that he offered an anti-gay rant (as some have called it). What is shocking is that this has not come up before.
As I wrote Tuesday, the South Brunswick Township Council had to wrestle with a similar issue a few years back regarding its Community Unity Day celebration:
A few years ago, the South Brunswick Township Council attempted to craft rules governing who could speak and not speak from the stage or have a booth at the township’s Community Unity Day celebration. The issue stemmed from a speech made during the 1999 festival in which a member of a Sayreville Christian group offered a fire-and-brimstone sermon from the stage.
The council at first attempted to split the difference — opting for a limited-access plan that would give the township some say over who was to speak and perform. We argued in an editorial (sorry, not available on line) at the time that “placing restrictions on groups based on the content of their speeches or performances would seem to violate these groups’ right to free expression. But to leave things as they are leaves the township open to the criticism that it is endorsing a particular faith, thereby tearing down the church-state wall.”
That’s why we had advocated having the township open the stage only to invited guests — primarily school acts and local dance groups — to prevent the likelihood that the stage might be dominated by religious groups and to keep the council out of the religion business.
The Ledger makes the same argument, but doesn’t explicitly call for the prayer to end:
If the lawmakers are going to invite ministers, priests, rabbis and imams to pray, they can’t dictate that the clergy tell them only what they want to hear. They can’t outlaw certain prayer topics. That’s precisely what the Constitution prohibits: government proscribing religious expression. It’s also a lesson that lawmakers should have learned in dealing with the last New Jersey poet laureate. Gov. James McGreevey stripped Amiri Baraka of his title as the laureate after Baraka read his poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2002. The poem about 9/11 was decried as anti-Semitic. The post has not been filled since.
The Constitution allows clergy, poets, artists and anybody else the right to free expression. For a government body to attempt to set parameters for that speech is, well, un-American. The Senate, it seems, has two choices: abandon the use of clergy or relinquish any attempt to censor what’s said.
If it was up to me, I’d send the clergy home.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 