Both have said that kids are prohibited from voluntarily and silently praying in school. I outlined the actual law in my first post in this thread.
Not sure I agree. ‘Prayer in School’ is pretty generally accepted to mean ‘organized prayer in school’, not just individual prayer. In that sense, what they are saying is true, isn’t it?
IIRC, he did this during both the Alito and Roberts confirmations. He wants to make sure that everyone knows WE’RE AT WAR and so endless detentions are, in his mind, legal. As RP noted, he was a military prosecutor so he has a particular hard-on for this issue.
Sessions: “barring students from even private, silent prayer in schools”
Graham: “kids cannot voluntarily pray in school”
I see no legitimate reason to phrase it as they did, so that the literal meaning is misleading and false. The generally accepted meaning of “private, silent prayer” and “voluntary prayer” is not “prayer directed by state officials.”
The far more likely explanation, I believe, is that they’re deliberating misstating the law for political purposes.
Kudos.
Look at the bright side… we don’t have to listen to Biden, at least. He drove me nuts during the previous hearings. So far, most of what I’ve heard is:
Democrat: Judge Sotomayor, wouldn’t you agree that you’re the most even handed judge ever to sit on the bench? Oh, and did I mention your amazing background story?
Republican: Judge Sotomayor, haven’t you said over and over again that brown skinned people are superior to white skinned people?
Sotomayor: I…really…would like to…express…my fidelity…to…the law. I like…following the law…
And if it weren’t for the brave men and women of the Senate, we might be forced to learning something about the views of this woman who’ll be involved in some of the most important legal decisions in the country for the next 20 or 30 years.
Okay, okay, her decisions probably say enough. But the speechifying is absurd.
Have to toss this in:
The crazy knows no end. :rolleyes:
ETA: There is a bit more to that article…just can’t post it all here for fair use rules and all that (notably the CPAC Director deleted the post shortly after and said she had not looked it up to see if it was true).
Well, I guess we’ll just disagree. Both of those quotes seem forthright to me if you accept they were talking about ‘Prayer in School’ as an organized activity. Even Sessions quote makes sense that way, given that his actual quote was “barring students from even private, even silent prayer in school”.
They are talking about Constitutional issues, probably about the ‘moment of silence’ lawas, when they talk about prayer in school. Has there even been a Constitutional case about a single student praying silently to himself in study hall? If not, why would you interpret their remarks in that context?
I think that, while what happened to Judge Bork certainly has had lingering effects, it cannot be blamed for the current knee-jerk hostility towards the nominee du jour which has been evidenced by both the Democrats and the Republicans. Remember, after Bork (and the silly Douglas Ginsburg episode), we had the uneventful elevations of Anthony Kennedy (97-0 with little posturing or dissent) and David Souter (90-9). Then with a side step for the Clarence Thomas nomination (which was inevitably going to have some strong feelings, since a conservative was replacing the most reliable liberal on the bench, as well as an icon for the achievement of minorities in the country), we go back to uneventful hearings for both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (and note that those were Democratic appointees, and such offered the Republicans a prime opportunity to dish back what their appointees had had to take (Bork and Thomas)).
So given the time frames involved (almost 20 years separating the nominations of Bork and Alito/Roberts), and the intervening non-hostile confirmation hearings of four out of five justices, I would be more likely to pin the current decade’s approach to these nominations on the much greater interest on the part of the public (or at least certain elements of the public) in the televising of Capitol Hill dealings, and the concomitant interest in the talking head phenomenom attached to cable news channels.
It is disingenuous to ignore the fact that these two very conservative senators are attempting to imply that it is illegal to pray in school, even privately, even if their statements can be “justified” by asserting that they are really talking about the result of Wallace v. Jaffree (the Alabama silent meditation/prayer minute case). The statments, taken at face value, and using the common meanings of the words, would mean that Johnny cannot silently pray on his own without being in trouble. Indeed, it’s not even clear that schools are precluded from having minutes of silence to start the day, so long as they articulate a secular reason for the minute and don’t attempt to emphasize prayer as something to do during the minute. Several states have such minutes (mine included), and they are not ruled on by the Supreme Court as of yet.
It gets tiring listening to those who have strong feelings politically constantly gripe about misperceived situations that actually reflect their unhappiness that they cannot have their way. That goes equally for extrememly liberal politicians as for extremely conservative ones.
Sinaijon:
I understand you to be arguing that by the word “prayer,” they mean “a required opportunity to pray” during which time a student may decide to privately (e.g. quietly) and voluntarily pray.
Even with this generous interpretation of what “prayer” and “privately” mean, their statements are still false and misleading. The court has not found a required opportunity for prayer unconstitutional. It merely decided that one state’s implementation of such a policy was, on those facts, an attempt to encourage religion. Many schools have had their moments of silence upheld in the federal courts.
Moreover, given the context of these Senator’s constituencies, I think the decision to say “prayer” instead of “required opportunity to pray” can reasonably be read as intending to mislead those ignorant of the law. There is a narrative out there that kids aren’t allowed to pray in schools (e.g. will be punished if caught praying in study hall or some such). I think they’re tapping into that narrative intentionally. Especially because these comments came without any context other than a litany of complaints about activist judges and as I said earlier, these were actually fairly robust decisions (neither was 5-4).
If these guys weren’t experienced lawyers, or if their comments were part of a larger discussion of school prayer that made the real law clear, I would dismiss it as unfortunate shorthand. But since they are experienced lawyers talking without such background context, who no doubt know the actual law here, I’m not willing to give them such slack.
Well, then, your disagreement isn’t with Richard Parker; it’s with Noah Webster. There is simply no reasonable way to interpret “private, silent prayer in schools” or “voluntarily pray in school” as references to the sort of institutionally-directed organized activity that has been found to be unconstitutional.
Meh. On every issue the people who feel strongly about it try to twist the meaning of the words to create a strawman argument. I think if we are going to indict Sessions and Graham for this, then every politician should be brought before the bar.
Ok by me. I’m one of those whackos who thinks our cheap political discourse hurts substantive policy and can be changed.
Perhaps they’re thinking of “voluntary prayer” within the meaning of Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe.
Sessions cannot be, since he was explicit about saying that it was silent and private.
Graham could conceivably be, I guess, when he said that the Constitution contained “no written statement that you can’t voluntarily pray in school.” Though, of course, this would still be pretty misleading. Santa Fe held that prayer “on school property, at school-sponsored events, over the school’s public address system, by a speaker representing the student body, under the supervision of school faculty, and pursuant to a school policy that explicitly and implicitly encourages public prayer” is unconstitutional. It’s some serious shorthand to cut that down to “can’t voluntarily pray in school.”
Then Graham was still being intentionally misleading and Sessions was flat out lying.
Hear hear. I wish that when politicians use strawman arguments that they’d be called on it by the reporters, but sadly I don’t think Nina Totenberg is ever going to say, “Senator Sessions used posed his question to the nominee in the discredited, strawman argument format…”