Posted by
CRB on Saturday, November 17, 2007 6:07:26 PM
Some radical pluralists demand that religious people speak language contrary to their beliefs. The premise for this position has to do with potential proselytizing, sectarian advancement, or potential conflicts with the Establishment clause. In a review of the situation by the League of WI Municipalities:
The court noted that the Supreme Court has directly addressed the constitutionality of legislative prayer only once in Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783, 791-95 (1983). In that case, a state legislator and taxpayer challenged the Nebraska legislature's practice of offering a brief prayer, conducted by a staff chaplain whose salary was paid from tax funds, before the start of official business each day. The Supreme Court upheld the practice of legislative prayer as "simply a tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held among the people of this country." However, the Marsh court noted in its analysis the prayers were "nonsectarian"and "Judeo Christian," and that, "[a]lthough some of [the chaplain's] earlier prayers were often explicitly Christian, [he] removed all references to Christ after a 1980 complaint from a Jewish legislator." The Marsh Court thus concluded: "The content of the prayer is not of concern to judges where, as here, there is no indication that the prayer opportunity has been exploited to proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief.
Instead of complaining that speech is being restricted (though it is) let's instead pursue the idea that is being advanced. What kind of "prayer" addresses all deities equally? Since there is no tolerance for orthodoxy, but there is not an absence of religion, is this nothing more than the polytheism of the Pantheon? For Christians to complain that their Messiah is reduced to equality with other deities is substantially the same claim that Muslims made in Europe when their faith was made equal to others in an editorial caricature. For Pluralists to reduce the pluralism to some ad absurdum statement is more than inconsistent. It is anti-Chrisitan. It is, again, not "plural" to require an "approved belief system".