First They Tried to Keep Women Out...
then they tried to keep Christianity IN. All this at a State funded, State run College. Go figure.
From Morons.org
With Scalia and Rehnquist having a tantrum over the decision, the Supreme Court has refused to hear an appealof a lower court's ruling that the dinner prayer at Virginia Military Institute violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals's ruling will stand, and there will be no more state-endorsed prayer at VMI.
VMI is part of Virginia's state university system; it is not a private school. Each night after students ("cadets") marched into the cafeteria ("mess hall") a student chaplain would lead the students in prayer, concluding with "Now, O God, we receive this food and share this meal together with thanksgiving. Amen."
Lawyers for the school, who hadn't read Abington v Schempp, argued that students were not required to recite the prayer themselves and also didn't have to listen to it. Abington School District v Schempp held that "that the availability of excusal or exemption simply has no relevance to the establishment question, if it is once found that these practices are essentially religious exercises designed at least in part to achieve religious aims through the use of public school facilities during the school day."
The judges in the 4th US Circuit had read Abington v Schempp and ruled that the military atmosphere at VMI created a culture of conformance such that students would feel coerced into participating in the school prayer, noting that the ruling in Abington said "the schools could not cure the Establishment Clause defect by simply allowing students to leave the room while the Bible verses or the Prayer were read."
The case began when two VMI students asked that the prayer ceremony be changed. When the school refused, the students sued with the help of the ACLU. This case is significant because earlier cases dealt only with school prayer in K-12 schools; this case is apparently the first of its kind to involve a state college.
---Nick