Not if you handwave hard enough.
We have a winner! 
His lawyer is really Humpty Dumpty.
“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Channeling my inner Fundy;
‘If America isn’t a Christian nation for Christians then why did Jesus right the Constitution?’
Love the right spelling (on purpose, or happy accident?)
On purpose.
I also visited the Turner Joy when I was in the Seattle area back in 2013. Bremerton was the only place in the area I didn’t smell any pot.
You (probably) thought you were joking:
Title: Mike Pence says Americans don’t have a right to freedom from religion
Nope, I’ve been hearing this shit from conservative fundies since the 1970’s . . . IOW all my life.
I’m not sure that follows though.
A person can make their own private choice to pray, the fact that it is performed in public doesn’t change the fact that it is their own private choice of religious expression.
(e.g. I have a right to my own private choice to eat what I want, including eating it in public.)
Now when it co-opts, pressures or otherwise influences others, that is when it stops being private in my opinion. (which I believe it does in this case)
Protestors who block traffic to try to make their point should stop chanting and start praying. It’s just their private choice of religious expression to pray in the middle of a public road.
I’m just waiting for some couple to have sex on the 50 yard line right after a game, and then appeal their arrest on the grounds that, as set in this precedent, they were in private.
By the standard I state above, those people praying in the middle of the road are having a negative effect on others.
Same as above, I think a reasonable person would say that having sex in public could be considered as having a negative effect on others (plus, there may be a consideration as to whether the half way line is perhaps private property)
I don’t think that the same could be said for someone making a personal choice to pray in public. I think people should definitely have a protected right to do so.
Really? What negative impact is caused by seeing a couple having sex? I guess it might offend someone - sort of like seeing someone pray might offend someone.
Of course, casual displays of sexuality are frowned upon by the moral code of Christianity; while seeing someone pray is, of course, NOT frowned upon by Christianity. But why should that be the standard?
This is where the “reasonable person” test comes in to it.
Do we think a reasonable person considers live graphic sex in a public place to be the equivalent of a person standing silently and praying by themselves in the same place?
As a social species we set some generally agreed limits of what constitutes “acceptable” as regards certain bodily functions and activities. I’m OK with sex being on one side of the line and personal prayer being on the other, even if I’m not personally offended by nudity and sex.
It is abitrary I readily admit.
No one was “standing silently and praying by themselves” here, so that’s a false comparison.
I think in our society the vast majority of people would not consider these things (public sex and publically leading a prayer group) to be equivalent, because the vast majority of people either hold religious views, or hold moral views that are shaped by society’s dominant religious views. We as a society are far more puritanical than we have any rational cause to be (and I include myself in that! I would also be more offended by a couple fucking on the field than a guy leading his team in praying, but I recognize that this is just my hangup and not a rational point about how society should be run.)
I don’t believe that a person who thinks that god can only hear their prayer if they make a big show of it could be described as a reasonable person.
hang on, I was referring to the wording in the following statement.
Which seems perfectly fair to me as a general statement. In the case of of the coach however I clearly stated.
So I’ve been clear that the coach overstepped the line.
I’m going to stop you right there. I said nothing at all about “leading a prayer group”
That’s not the “reasonable person” I’m talking about,