The Simple Point Is Fairness For All Common Sense Won School Policy Tried To Sneak In Prayers.

Religion is not a bad thing. Most religions encourage goodness and discourage evil. Everyone who wants to be religious should be able to be religious.

The problem is that there is little agreement about what it means to be religious. First, there are a dozen or so major religions. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, to name a few, have different beliefs. And there’s heated disagreement over what it means to be a Christian or a Jew, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist.

But they have this in common: They know they’ve got it right and the other guys have it wrong.

That is why our leaders decided early on that the government shouldn’t tell people what to do about religion.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court said a school district in Santa Fe, Texas, had gone too far.

School officials had established a policy allowing high school students to vote on whether to have a student speaker before football games and then have another vote on who that speaker would be. School officials had been fighting for years to find a legal way to incorporate prayer in school activities and they thought this policy was it.

They said the policy wasn’t necessarily about prayer. If a student speaker were elected, she or he could deliver “a brief invocation and/or message.” It might be a message, not a prayer. And after all, it’s the students deciding, not the government.

Nonsense.

Six members of the Supreme Court saw the policy for what it was: an arm of government - the school board - enabling students to elect another student to pray for all students.

It doesn’t matter that most students at Santa Fe High School want a Christian prayer before football games. It matters that some don’t.

Monday’s decision doesn’t prevent prayer in schools or anywhere else. It prevents schools from allowing anyone to practice a particular brand of religion for the benefit of everyone else.

Public prayer may be a sacred act to those who do it but it is also a ritual that reinforces the collective righteousness of those who join and isolates those who don’t.

Monday’s ruling was not a blow against religion or spirituality. It was a victory of common sense.