Nobody is prohibited from praying on their own time. The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a forum.
Please stop pinging me every time the law does something you don't like because you don't understand it. Don't pretend you know it all just because you read the Constitution in high school.
Freedom to express one's faith is not conditional on location. To rule otherwise as our leftist blackrobes do is to deny the God given freedoms of the 1st Amendment.
Nobody is prohibited from praying on their own time. The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a forum. Please stop pinging me every time the law does something you don't like because you don't understand it. Don't pretend you know it all just because you read the Constitution in high school...............jude24
If the First Amendment prohibited the government from providing any forum that could be used for religious expression, the Chaplain Corps in the Armed Forces would be unconstitutional.
The First Amendment does prohibit government from forcing your participation in a religious service but it does not protect you from your fellow citizens willingly exercising their First Amendment Free Exercise Clause rights at a graduation any more than it protects you from hearing some atheist parent shout out "God is Dead!" at a graduation.
But, let's take this discussion out of the hypothetical and straight into reality.
As I answered peggybac in Post 39:
What would happen if a group of students stood and said The Lord's Prayer, and others joined in???........... peggybac
That would be a Constitutional right under the Free Exercise Clause........ Polybius
That scenario is exactly what happened at that graduation:
Judge: No prayer at graduation (But KY students ignore ACLU ruling, recite Lord's Prayer!)
Some might think that is inconsiderate to non-Christians and that "they should have done it on their own time". Some might even believe that it is unconstitutional and that they had no legal right to do so.
Be that as it may, the fact of the legal matter is that those people at the graduation exercised their First Amendment Free Exercise Clause rights and, constitutionally, there is not a damned thing that the Judge or the ACLU or an offended atheist parent can do about it.
Spoken like an elitist.
The Constitution is obviously too deep, nuanced, algore-like for a non blackrobe to understand. You forget that the Constitution was debated for the common man in newspapers and became known as the Federalist Papers.
As for my high school Constitution class we never read it. Like many law schools we studied case law. I learned about penumbras and emanations, that the right to abortion was hidden in several amendments, there is no personal right to bear arms, public prayer is a violation and that the Constitution is a living, breathing document.
It took a while, but I eventually unlearned all that nonsense. Apparently you did not.