Divided 4th Circuit upholds constitutionality of lawmaker-led prayer at county meetings
A North Carolina county board may legally continue to say lawmaker-led prayers before public meetings, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.
A 2-1 panel of the Richmond, Virginia-based court upheld the prayer practices of the Rowan County Board of Commissioners, according to the Salisbury Post, the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal (sub.req.) The ruling reverses a decision from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
The case was decided after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway. That case, which split 5-4, said the sectarian prayers said in Greece, New York, are permissible under the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause because they are not coercive; do not advocate for or against a religion; and do not discriminate against minority faiths when choosing prayer leaders. Those prayers were offered by volunteer clergy from the Greece area.
One important difference in North Carolina, the AP notes, is that the Rowan County commissioners led the prayers themselves. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the commission in 2013 after 5.5 years and 140 meetings in which no prayers ever mentioned a religion other than Christianity. The commission also would invite the audience to participate in the prayers, opening it to charges that it was pressuring the public to adhere to its chosen religion.
A district judge found these practices unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause, the Salisbury Post says. But two judges from a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit reversed that decision. The Supreme Court has not ruled on prayers led by legislators, wrote Judge G. Steven Agee in the opinion (PDF) for the majority, but that should not be interpreted as proof that such prayers are not allowed.
Echoing the Town of Greece decision, Agee wrote that a long tradition of prayers before government meetings supports continuing that tradition. He also dismissed the idea that adults would feel pressured to convert or join prayers they wouldn’t otherwise say just because it’s “speech they would rather not hear.” And, according to the Salisbury Post, Agee wrote that prayers never disparage, proselytize or insult.
“Thus, there is limited risk that disenchanted listeners would be affected by mere contact with lawmaker-led legislative prayer,” Agee wrote. “The board’s legislative prayer practice amounts to nothing more than an individual commissioner leading a prayer of his or her own choosing.”
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, disagreed in what the AP called a strongly worded dissent. The Salisbury Post noted that Wilkinson disagreed that Town of Greece supports the majority’s viewpoint; “it is a conceptual world apart,” he wrote. And the prayer practice in Rowan County “pushes every envelope.”
“When the state’s representatives so emphatically evoke a single religion in nearly every prayer over a period of many years, that faith comes to be perceived as the one true faith, not merely of individual prayer-givers, but of government itself,” wrote Wilkinson.
The ACLU told the Salisbury Post it would ask for an en banc rehearing. Until appeals are over, said Greg Edds, chair of the Rowan County Commission, the commission will continue to use volunteer chaplains.
