I feel the need to debate the provisions in the Constitution.
If you want to allow prayer in government, then where in the Constitution does it allow you to deny any religion the right to have their prayer included?
If you want to allow prayer in government, then where in the Constitution does it allow you to deny any religion the right to have their prayer included?
The Constitution, for good or for ill, was constructed during a time when, rightly or wrongly, its framers considered that we had arrived at an age in which most reasonable men would accept at least the deistic concept of a just (but remote) God, and perhaps the theistic idea of a just and directly-involved God. It had not entered their heads to believe that educated people would embrace ancient, abandoned creeds of tree-and-star-worship any more than they would revive the sacrifice of bulls to Mithras, or the tossing of infants into the fires of Moloch. They beleived in the onward march of human progress (a rather newish idea at the time) and the innate decency and sanity of human beings. They really believed that humans, freed from oppression, would reveal their inner, truly good selves. They did not count on the spite and bile that would erupt later, spit in the faces of these assumptions, and use the very mechanisms of the Constitution to pee on the sort of nation that the Constitution was intended to produce.
Civilized people of good will do not have to spell out the obvious. Those who cannot or will not see the obvious regard the absence of explicit prohibition as permission.
Or something.