High-ish Court sez Kristian kouncil-meeting prayers are OK 'kause they're not Kristian, they're, uh, ceremonial

Slow Anthony, stop! We're laughing so hard, we're gonna bust a gut! We're sure gonna miss the legal-comedy stylings of the High-ish Court's clown prince when he's gone.

"The inclusion of a brief, ceremonial prayer as part of a larger exercise in civic recognition suggests that its purpose and effect are to acknowledge religious leaders and the institutions they represent, rather than to exclude or coerce nonbelievers."

-- from Justice "Slow Anthony" Kennedy's soon-to-be-
released debut comedy album, Slow Anthony Live!

by Ken

Someday we're going to miss the comedy judicial stylings of "Slow Anthony" Kennedy, the clown prince of the U.S. Supreme Court. That is, once we have the opportunity to miss the Slowmaster, that is. Like when he decides he's had enough fun on the High-ish Court and decides to strike out into the bottom-most rung of the comedy-club circuit, possibly soon to be seen at a bowling alley near you. The great thing for "Slow A" is that he won't have to write material; he can just shoot the shit about his approach to deciding constitutional issues.

(When that day comes, we'll probably also miss Slow Anthony because what comes after him is likely to be worse.)

Today Slow Anthony announced to an unexpecting world that Kristian prayers before local council meetings are A-OK -- because they're not Christian, they're just pieces of American culture. Okay, as comedy it's pretty lame -- like a joke recycled from Friends With Better Lives or Bad Teacher. But as jurisprudence, well, it sucks hellaciously, but then, the Roberts Court, like the late-era Rehnquist Court before it, sets impossibly low standards for jurisprudence.

The issue before the Court in Town of Greece v. Galloway was the practice by the town council of Greece, NY (near Syracuse), of beginning meetings with avowedly and almost exclusively Christian prayers. Two local non-Christian residents objected and sued; the town was upheld at the town level but then overturned by a panel of the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which is now overturned by the High-ish Court. As AP's anonymous scribe explains it:

From 1999 through 2007, and again from January 2009 through June 2010, every meeting was opened with a Christian-oriented invocation. In 2008, after residents Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens complained, four of 12 meetings were opened by non-Christians, including a Jewish layman, a Wiccan priestess and the chairman of the local Baha'i congregation. Galloway and Stephens are described in their court filings as a Jew and an atheist.

A town employee each month selected clerics or lay people by using a local published guide of churches. The guide did not include non-Christian denominations, however. The appeals court found that religious institutions in the town of just under 100,000 people are primarily Christian, and even Galloway and Stephens testified they knew of no non-Christian places of worship there.

The manner of exclusion of non-Christian invokers figured in the, er, thinking of the Court majority, and so did the fact that non-Christians were not being "coerced" -- although the Bobbsey Twins of the ultra-right-wing Court majority, Justices Clarence Thomas and Nino Scalia, didn't buy into the non-coercion business, insisting that a little koercion is fine as long as it's Kristian, and not legally imposed.

As the AP's Mark Sherman put it:

Writing for the court on Monday, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that forcing clergy to scrub the prayers of references to Jesus Christ and other sectarian religious figures would turn officials into censors. Instead, Kennedy said, the prayers should be seen as ceremonial and in keeping with the nation's traditions.

"The inclusion of a brief, ceremonial prayer as part of a larger exercise in civic recognition suggests that its purpose and effect are to acknowledge religious leaders and the institutions they represent, rather than to exclude or coerce nonbelievers," Kennedy said.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court's four liberal justices, said, "I respectfully dissent from the court's opinion because I think the Town of Greece's prayer practices violate that norm of religious equality — the breathtakingly generous constitutional idea that our public institutions belong no less to the Buddhist or Hindu than to the Methodist or Episcopalian."

The most comical aspect of Slow Anthony's legal-comedy routine is this business of Christian prayers being jake because they're part of the culture -- just ceremonial, after all, but fine because the people are mostly Christians anyway. Any chance that this "ceremonial" nonsense might be taken seriously by right-wingers dancing in the streets today is given the lie by this comment reported by the AP's Sherman: "Senior counsel David Cortman of the Alliance Defense Freedom, which represented the town, applauded the court for affirming 'that Americans are free to pray.' " Of course neither Davy C nor any of the other Americans for Religious Imposition is likely to be able to cite a single instance in which any Christian ever suffered so much as the feeblest effort to impinge on his/her right to pray. Perhaps because American Kristians are konstitutionally liars and thugs as well as fascists, they equate "the right to pray" with "the right to force their prayers on any-goddamaned-body they fucking feel like."

You know the old saying: "Give the Krap Kristians an inch, and they'll stomp all over you for a mile."

There's good news, though. From Mark Sherman's AP account:

Ayesha Khan, legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the court disregarded the interests of religious minorities and nonbelievers. But Khan said she saw a "silver lining" in the outcome because the court rejected a more sweeping ruling that would have made it even harder to prove a violation of the Constitution.

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