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May 12, 2000/7 Iyar 5760, Vol. 52, No.36
County board asked to adopt prayer guidelines
CHRIS GARIFO
Senior Editor
A local Jewish businessman has met with mixed success in trying to convince the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to change the invocation that begins its formal meetings.
Meyer Turken, owner and president of Turken Industrial Properties Inc. in Phoenix, said he believes the invocation is "exclusionary and not inclusive to non-Christians. If you're a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, Buddhist or whatever, you're basically left out of the invocation."
Turken said he became outraged while attending a supervisors meeting Aug. 4 during which a county employee invoked Jesus Christ while giving the invocation. Turken sent a letter that same day to the board chairman at the time, Fulton Brock of District 1.
"He kind of stonewalled me until one day he was rotated out of the chairmanship of the board. They rotate (the position) every year," Turken said.
But Robert Pizorno, Brock's chief of staff, said Brock's office had been in regular contact with Turken on the issue and had simply reached the point where "the supervisor's position was we should just agree to disagree on this and move forward."
Rabbi Kenneth I. Segel of Temple Beth Israel in Scottsdale said he and Turken spoke with Brock by phone, but "there was no meeting of the minds on separation of church and state. He just didn't see it as that kind of an issue."
Brock was unavailable for comment.
After corresponding and speaking with Turken about the issue, current supervisors Chairman Andy Kunasek of District 3 sent a memo March 9 to the other supervisors asking them to share with future givers of the invocation a set of guidelines.
Those guidelines are:
- Prayers should be nondenominational, universal in nature and all-inclusive.
- References to any specific religious leader or religious founder would not be appropriate, except for references to God.
- The prayer should be one or two minutes in length.
Turken said he believes Kunasek did not go far enough in that no effort was made to formally adopt the guidelines.
Kunasek, however, said the guidelines are simply the first step and are being used to see how well they work as just a suggestion.
"If we feel that that kind of informal request to fellow board members doesn't work out, we'll address it further," Kunasek said.
Kunasek added that, in trying to establish formal guidelines on the invocation, the supervisors risk stepping into "censorship of people's religious views."
Also, Kunasek said, "When you start elevating it to a firm, hard-and-fast policy, you start getting to the point where perhaps we just eliminate it altogether. I would like to achieve some proper balance without entering that territory."
Although he recognizes separation of church and state issues, Kunasek said, he also believes that it's important that a segment of the meeting remind the supervisors that there are "higher authorities, and that we all should kind of keep that big picture in mind as we make decisions on everything."
Kunasek said it is unclear what effect, if any, the guidelines have had on what is being said during the invocation but "I haven't seen any glaring oversteps like I have seen in the past."
Turken, however, said his next step might be to go to the American Civil Liberties Union and use the courts to address the issue.
"(The Board of Supervisors is) ignoring it because it's different from them," Turken said. "It's intolerant and it's insensitive."
Insensitivity, however, is not a legal standard, said Eleanor Eisenberg, executive director of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union.
"There is nowhere in the Constitution or any statute that I know of that says we have to be sensitive to each other's needs," she said.
Though an invocation probably does violate the Constitution because prayer in and of itself is derived from religious doctrine, the AZCLU likely will not take any court action, Eisenberg said, until a final decision is made in a case now under way in Ohio over that state's motto, which was challenged as violating separation of church-and-state standards.
Ohio on Monday, May 8, asked the full 15-member panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a ruling last month by a three-member panel of the court that the state motto - "With God, all things are possible" - is improper because it is derived from a passage taken directly from the New Testament.
If the case should reach the U.S. Supreme Court, a ruling there could have a major effect, Eisenberg said.
"If the Supreme Court were, for instance, to issue a decision saying that it is impermissible for a state motto to have religious content, then there are a whole series of ceremonial, ... religious-content events or acts of government that would be open to challenge," Eisenberg said.
Kunasek said having an invocation is a benefit.
"(The invocation) should cause us all to think beyond today, to think beyond our own personal issues," Kunasek said. "I think it is effective at that. ... I think it is important to be as inclusive as possible without going over the edge of censorship."
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