Given the state of the economy, the state of Hartford commercial real estate, a mayor headed for jail, and unfriendly city property taxes, the practice of starting every City Council meeting with a prayer didn’t seem so bad.
Satan seemed to be having his way; why not give the other guy a chance?
Now, of course, the meetings start, not with a little ditty by a volunteer minister, rabbi or priest, but by a moment of sullen silence, in memory of an unsuccessful proposal to have Muslim clerics launch a few council sessions — an idea that led to almost as many protests as Hartford Business Journal would get if it tried to drop the Cohen column.
While much of the comment and reaction to the council flip-flop focused on a rise in anti-Islamic feelings across the land, the instinct to start a government meeting with a prayer has a long, weird legal and political history, having nothing at all to do with Islam.
Chaplains, as they are often dubbed when they are on the payroll, have been designated prayer manufacturers at government proceedings for decades — a tradition often met with grumbling by faithful and non-believer alike — be they Catholic, congregational, Calvinist or Cohen Column cultists.
The issue has made its invariable journey up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1983 that the Constitution gave its blessing (so to speak) to the tradition of paying a chaplain to open each day’s session of the Nebraska legislature with a prayer.
A federal appeals court had gone the other way, in part because for 10 years, the chaplain had always been a Presbyterian. By the way, the Presbyterian fella was paid $319.75 per month, in 1965, to write sermons, which is much more than some columnists get in 2010 to produce prose that makes the angels weep with joy.
But, Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the majority, opined that the “practice of opening legislative sessions with prayer has became part of the fabric of our society, especially when the chaplain is a Presbyterian, because the fabric tends to be that cool plaid stuff from Scotland.”
Well, no, he didn’t actually write that last part, but you get the drift.
In South Carolina, a judge barred the Great Falls, S.C., town council from mentioning that ‘Jesus’ guy in its opening prayers — one of many such local-yokel rulings across the country.
Jesus is often an unwelcome visitor in the prayer game. In 2006, Congress yanked authorization for military chaplains to mention Jesus in official prayers.
This extravagant funny business does not suggest that the Hartford City Council yanked the Muslim invitation because of First Amendment principles. But, there’s something to be said for a certain level of First Amendment deadlock on such issues, whatever the hidden motives.
It was James Madison who celebrated the “multiplicity of sects which pervades Americaˆ for where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.”
The discomfort over picking a cleric to lead the politicians in prayer has been around and about for long before the American Civil Liberties Union began to amuse itself with threatening letter and lawsuits on the issue.
In 1879, the Unitarian polemicist Robert Ingersoll spoke to the National Liberal League (yes, even then, there were ‘liberals’) convention, where he called for eliminating the tax exemption for churches — and, of course, he demanded that the public employment of chaplains be ended.
What will the Hartford City Council do about its opening prayer? Only God knows.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
