United States Constitution gives all citizens security, but it's not a blanket

The U.S. Constitution affords every American a wondrous wealth of freedoms yet that document, as powerful as it is, can't insulate any of us from feeling embarrassed or angry or alone.

This matter of the Constitution's limits, it seems to me, gets right to the heart of the recently re-ignited controversy over the Baker City Council's practice of beginning its meetings with an invocation.

Several years ago when he was a city councilor, Gary Dielman, the most vocal opponent of those invocations, said the Council should strive to avoid creating an atmosphere, during its meetings, in which any citizen might feel "alien, outcast or stranger."

I understood implicitly what Gary was getting at, and I agreed.

I would rather feel familiar than strange, and I prefer the warmth of belonging to a group to the chill that sets the nonconforming outsider to shivering.

But I don't believe the Constitution can shelter me from that kind of weather; and more to the point, I don't think the men who wrote that treatise intended that it would ever serve as that sort of blanket.

I've attended something like 400 City Council meetings since 1993 and an invocation of some sort, often a prayer, was offered at almost every one. Offered, it seems to me, is the crucial word.

No one ever told me I had to stand. I did stand, almost every time, but out of respect for the person speaking and to honor the solemnity of the gesture, not because I feared any repercussions had I decided to sit.

Now a person could argue that when a government entity puts a prayer right on its meeting agenda, then it is at least implying that standing and praying is the right thing to do, and that if you decline to do so you are not the sort of person the government thinks you ought to be.

That's a distressing notion — the government compelling you, through the peer pressure that permeates the public arena, to engage in some ritual which you might think silly, or even downright distasteful. It's just that scenario, I suspect, that has persuaded many Americans to believe that any type of prayer made in a public building amounts to discrimination.

I can't go along with that.

If I am free to stand and pray, and the person in the next seat is equally free to sit and work a crossword puzzle, then it seems to me that all is as it should be.

It may well be, of course, that the person who sits while I stand will feel left out. And for some the gap between that uncomfortable feeling and the trampling of the Constitution is so narrow as to be imperceptible.

But I think the gap is much more substantial than that. I think it's a yawning expanse, in fact, which you'd need a sturdy bridge to get across.

The test for our nation and for our Constitution, I believe, is not whether the one person quivers with embarrassment or shame as he sits while all the others around him stand. The test is whether he can sit there and quiver without worrying that he's going to get tossed in jail — or get a bullet in his head — for his trouble.

I'm confident that the Baker City Council passes that test.

Which doesn't mean, however, that our local government is completely in the clear, constitutionally speaking.

Although I believe government bodies have the legal right to conduct prayers during their meetings (a matter the Supreme Court tossed around in its 1983 Marsh v. Chambers decision), I also believe they have a legal obligation to ensure that prayers given during official meetings do not endorse a specific religion.

And thanks to a federal court ruling issued just this week, it appears the government has not only the legal obligation, but also the legal authority to edit, as it were, prayers said during meetings or other government-sponsored functions.

The 4th District U.S. Court of Appeals — one step below the Supreme Court — issued that ruling on Wednesday in a case involving a city councilor in Fredericksburg, Va.

Councilor Hashmel Turner, who is a Baptist minister, sued his fellow councilors after they voted, in 2005, to allow only non-sectarian prayers during their meetings.

The Fredericksburg Council made that decision after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the city because Turner, while giving a prayer during a meeting, invoked Jesus Christ's name

That's exactly what happened during the Baker City Council's July 8 meeting.

In writing the Appeals Court's opinion, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor concluded that the city's policy requiring non-sectarian prayer does not violate Turner's First Amendment rights because: "Turner was not forced to offer a prayer that violated his deeply held religious beliefs. Instead, he was given the chance to pray on behalf of government. Turner was unwilling to do so in the manner that the government had proscribed, but remains free to pray on his own behalf, in nongovernmental endeavors, in the manner dictated by his conscience."

That's pretty succinct, for a lawyer.

The court's ruling seems to me to exemplify those great and noble ideas which inspired the creation of our nation.

I feel fortunate to live in a country where the people we elect to represent us can, if they feel it necessary, ask for the guidance of a higher power before they deliberate about the people's business.

As for the people — me, for instance — they can go along with their representatives or sit there and snub their noses.

And finally, I prefer that the government leave it to each of us to decide, should we desire the aid of a guide, which higher power is the more skilled cartographer.

The government, after all, has quite enough to do figuring out how to fix the sidewalks.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.