The D.C. Circuit unanimously upheld religious prayer in Congress last week, following a lawsuit that attempted to halt the tradition of opening House meetings with invocations to God. While the lawsuit is unsurprising, it’s still good to see federal judges maintain the authority of the First Amendment, specifically the much-contested establishment clause.
According to the opinion in Barker v. Conroy, “a member of the House asked the Chaplain, Father Patrick J. Conroy, to invite Daniel Barker, a former Christian minister-turned-atheist, to serve as guest chaplain and deliver a secular invocation. Conroy denied the request, and Barker sued, alleging that Conroy unconstitutionally excluded him from the guest chaplain program because he is an atheist.”
Barker also happens to be the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization dedicated to separating church and state. If that little controversy wasn’t contrived, I don’t know what was. But I digress.
In its opinion, the Court said the House doesn’t violate the establishment clause when it limits its opening prayers to religious prayers, as opposed to secular ones, because our country has enjoyed a “longstanding … tradition” of prayer prior to legislative meetings for more than 200 years. Organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation are known for making this kind of pedestrian argument, which is more anti-religion than it is anti-establishment. It usually fails as it did here.
It’s still worth noting the Court’s opinion actually outlines the beauty of how the Founding Fathers drafted the First Amendment and what they meant when they referred to an “establishment.” I spoke with Eric Baxter, of the Becket Fund, on the phone. He filed an amicus brief in support of the chaplain and explained the decision further.
“When we analyze the establishment clause, we have to look and see what the founders meant by it. There’s a continuous history, back to the founding of legislative bodies, of starting meetings with prayer. It’s understood that this is not an establishment of religion. The founders had a very specific idea of what an establishment was: forcing people to worship, establishing a religion or church for the country,” he said.
Despite this decision, the Freedom From Religion Foundation continues on the warpath in an effort to strip religion from the public square, always claiming that any kind of religious statues, monuments, prayers, or documents endorse religion and violate the establishment clause. On Tuesday the Times-Reporter reported the Wisconsin chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation is now attacking Welty Middle School for having a plaque of the Ten Commandments at the school. Guess what they’re claiming? That a Ten Commandments plaque violates the establishment clause.
Like prayer at the start of a House meeting, the Ten Commandments don’t endorse religion, but they are a marker of this country’s origins and, in fact, the entire reason this country began: to enjoy religious freedoms unavailable elsewhere.
While organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation certainly have the right to exist and can file lawsuits until the end of time, their relentless attempts to strip the country of its religious and historical foundation by forcing every single utterance to God to stop or monument about God to be torn down is a window into their vapid existence. I’m glad to see even the D.C. Circuit rely on Supreme Court precedent to recognize the real meaning of the establishment clause and honor the First Amendment.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
