What to say to people who get offended by prayer

Some say ‘you don’t have to look or listen’, but that doesn’t even begin to keep anti-religion activists from pushing for laws to forbid the public expression of faith.

However, this may.

Two federal appellate courts said “enough” and have recently thrown out ACLU lawsuits brought to stop prayer before the Indiana Legislature and a school board in Louisiana because the ACLU’s clients had suffered no harm—that is, they “lacked standing” to bring a lawsuit in the first place. So, rulings on “standing” are now protecting public prayer.

The obscure doctrine of “standing” means that federal courts cannot hear a lawsuit unless the person bringing it has suffered some concrete injury by the hand of the government, and the federal courts can do something to remedy that harm. The Constitution itself in Article III imposes these standing requirements on everyone bringing a lawsuit in federal court.

For decades, the ACLU has convinced federal courts to ignore these rules of standing when it brings its extreme lawsuits to eradicate the posting the Ten Commandments in city hall, to censor the singing of Christmas carols in the public schools, or to stop a school board meeting from opening in prayer. The ACLU locates the village atheist, and files a lawsuit on his behalf, asking the federal court to stop the practice because it allegedly violates the so-called “separation of church and state” in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

But the village atheist has suffered no “concrete injury.”

This is another case of the answer already existing within the law, but not applied until someone digs it out and goes “Aha!” The real wonder  (to me, anyway) is not that it’s there, but that it takes so long to find and apply it.

The ACLU and its allies have been getting away with this for decades. Representing clients that have experienced no real harm, they have succeeded in eliminating ceremonies and other practices mentioning God and our nation’s dependence on Him, some of which date back to before the founding of our Republic. But finally the courts are waking up. They are imposing the standing rules across the board and rejecting these lawsuits until the ACLU finds someone who has actually been harmed by the government’s actions.

No doubt they’re working on that idea right now.

But meanwhile, this is good news. And now that the Christmas season is here, I hope more media folks start asking the right questions when they cover these stories about bans on anything Christmas. Like, “What harm does this cause?”