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September 22, 2000/22 Elul 5760, Vol. 52, No.55
Prayer case teaches lessons
MARC STERN
Washington Jewish Week
School is back in session. And once again school prayer is in the news, this time with the latest efforts to preserve the tradition of praying at school events, most notably at school football games, in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last June that appeared to bar the practice.
In the public mind, the controversy is largely a legal dispute. Is such prayer private or an action of the state? Whose rights are primary, those who wish to speak or those of a captive audience of unwilling listeners? Does the Constitution prohibit or require differential treatment of religion in public schools? Interesting questions, but casting the disputes as legal ones obscures what the fight is all about in human, social and Jewish, terms.
About 10 years ago, the American Jewish Congress represented a Jewish football player in a small Florida town. Every game began with a prayer offered by a student, almost always in Jesus' name. Our client understandably felt left out and brought suit.
At a hearing, the school superintendent complained that the plaintiff's challenge to the prayers was interfering with the schools effort to inculcate patriotism. It became clear that the dispute was not about prayer as such or legal doctrine; it was about whose town it was, and whose culture the school would represent.
Things have not changed much. The recent Supreme Court school prayer case arose in Santa Fe, Texas. The plaintiffs were a Mormon and a Catholic family whose children had been harassed in school, sometimes by teachers. This was no disagreement about legal theories of the meaning of the establishment clause. It was a fight over turf. Was Santa Fe a "Christian" town or could just anybody claim to be an equal citizen?
The one known Jewish family in Santa Fe, the Nevelows, sat the suit out. They sensed they and their child already were too vulnerable, too exposed. Following the court's decision, their son's schoolmates attacked him, announcing, "Oh, you are the Jew." He was harassed by children screaming, "Heil Hitler," his book covers decorated with swastikas. When his parents complained, school officials claimed they had seen and heard nothing.
Convinced that the officials would do nothing to protect their son, the Nevelows placed him in a neighboring school. And they have sued the Santa Fe district, claiming a violation of their son's right to be protected from anti-Semitic harassment.
Some religion-in-the-school cases are legitimate disputes over whether a particular practice is legal. There also are times when in the name of church-state separation, advocates occasionally slip over into the untutored devotion to the secular against which Justice Arthur Goldberg warned 40 years ago.
And there is the matter of the moment of silence, which imposes on no one any religious exercise but allows for deeply felt religious expression for those who choose to do so. The political impetus for legislating such practice, as Virginia recently did, may be to bring God to the classroom with official blessing. Still, it often is unwise to challenge such statutes without proof that they are being used to sanction something more than silence.
The Nevelows' case, though, is not about religion and the worship of God, but about ownership of the schools and the community. And it reminds of the risk of personal liability for school officials who fail to protect children of all faiths evenhandedly.
Marc Stern is assistant executive director of the American Jewish Congress.
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