[doug9732]

"... the government has no right to endorse any particular religion ..."

Correct. And the public schools are agencies of the government. Sectarian prayers should not be led by public officials acting in their official capacity.

[TXnMA]

How conveniently you ignore the second half:

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"Congress shall make no law

respecting an establishment of religion,

or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"

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[TXnMA]

IOW, you spout typical ACLU crap...

[Wallace T.]

"..public schools are agencies of the government" Agreed. This fact is a strong argument for the separation of school and state, and in fact for minimizing the role of government in society generally. The state religion, or belief system if you will, in the United States is agnostic secular humanism. To remove God from public discourse, as the secular humanists would do, or even to go back to the generic Great Architect of the Universe/Supreme Being that was common in the first half of the last century (which survives in institutions like the Boy Scouts), as many conservatives prefer, is advocacy of a religious and philosophical viewpoint as surely as that seen in the Puritan commonwealth of John Winthrop and Cotton Mather.

Since the days of the Warren Court, judicial decisions have removed the vestal remnants of Christianity and, in the more radical cases, even belief in God from government. In so doing, they have not achieved neutrality, but rather promoted a rival religion. Public officials are supposed to follow the religion of secular humanism in matters of state, even if they trust in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ for their personal salvation. It matters not if Bush is a Methodist or Kerry professes to be a Catholic. Their decision making is supposed to come from a worldview closer to that of Bertrand Russell than to those of John Wesley or Thomas Aquinas.

Every government is based on one sort of religion or another. People, whether atheist, agnostic, deist, Christian, Jewish, etc., should not be impelled to have their tax money support the promulgation of beliefs they oppose, especially to their own children.