Total Suppression Is Complete Overkill Court Robs Children Prayer Is A Precious Part Of Life, Culture.

In the documentary “Truth or Dare,” Madonna gathers singers and dancers in a circle before each performance to say a prayer before dashing on to the stage. According to a Gallup poll, 89 percent of people say they pray - and those prayers take place in some surprising places.

But don’t look for prayer anytime soon in a school near you. The U.S.

Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling made it clear that public school prayer, no matter how subtle, how agreed upon, how welcomed, is verboten. The justices ruled that student-led prayer violates the Constitution’s demand for separation of church and state.

Let’s have a moment of silence for this nearsighted decision.

The case that made its way to the top court was an in-your-face challenge. To skirt existing laws against public school prayers, the Santa Fe, Texas, school district allowed students to elect a student leader who organized prayer before football games. The daughter of a local Baptist minister prayed “in the name of Jesus” before the games. Her prayer obviously excluded those who do not belong to Jesus-based faiths and probably did go too far.

But the ruling makes it nearly impossible to acknowledge spirituality of any kind - in any context - in our public schools. This is unfortunate, because children in our society hunger for deeper meaning. Children see thousands of commercials each year for the material goods they are supposed to hunger for - toys, Gameboys, junk food. The religion of consumerism is available everywhere, while messages about the power of prayer are harder for children to uncover.

The ruling also makes it impossible to share the cultures behind prayers. As our society grows more diverse, so do the religions practiced by families who send their kids to public schools. Children from Buddhist, Jewish or Hindu homes lose the opportunity to share with Christian classmates the prayers of their faiths.

The Founding Fathers did not intend the separation of church and state to go this far, according to a recent commentary in The Wall Street Journal. The goal of the First Amendment was to “bolster the individual pursuit of religious ideas, not to exclude religion from the public square.”

A child’s most important public square is school. Now, no prayers are allowed there. That’s a final amen difficult to accept.