Oppressing them Christians again

Amanda at Pandagon has an update on the prayer issue --

You'll remember back here

http://delagar.blogspot.com/2005/04/we-need-that-prayer.html

The Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors decided they should open with a prayer, to remind everyone they were living in a nice, moral country, not a godless heathen country like Europe or Iraq or any of them other heathen places.

And, even though the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors was clearly acting in its capacity as an agent of the state, this would not, they claimed, be a violation of the establishment clause of the first amendment because they would let people from different religions give the prayer.

Dandy.

So a Wiccan woman petitions to give the prayer.

They refuse.

She sues, with the help of the Virginia ACLU.

And she has lost the case -- at least this round:

http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/05/you_have_the_fr.html

Why?

The 4th Circuit ruled Chesterfield County’s Board of Supervisors did not show impermissible motive in refusing to permit a pantheistic invocation by a Wiccan because its list of clergy who registered to conduct invocations covers a wide spectrum of Judeo-Christian denominations.

As Amanda points out, this is bogus.

Nothing in the First Amendment says anything about the protecting the right to practice only Judeo-Christian religions; nothing in the First-Amendment says the state will only be responsible for endorsing or not endorsing (if it gets into the business of endorsing, which, Good Heavens, it ought not to be in the first place) only Judeo-Christian religions.

And, Chesterfield County guys? This is exactly why you don't go putting prayers into your meetings, your classrooms, your state-sponsered events of any kind. What do you think we liberals have been telling you all this time?

Not to protect the atheists and agnostics and Wiccans.

To protect you, and your delicate little Christian sensibilities, which can't bear up to sitting still and listening to a prayer to some God or Goddess who is not your own.

(Hey. How do you think some of us have felt all this time, by the way?

In Jesus Christ's name we pray. Amen.)