Like a prayer

By S.M. | NEW YORK

DISPUTES about the contours of religious liberty in America are often marked by sanctimony, exaggerated offence, sloppy history, hyperbole and conceptual confusion, and then tend to be resolved with embarrassingly casuistic distinctions. In keeping with this tradition, a small-town conflict in upstate New York offers a fresh reminder of the jurisprudential price of religious freedom.

Town of Greece v Galloway, which the Supreme Court will consider in the fall (and which my colleague covers in this week's paper), asks whether local officials have been violating the constitution over the past 14 years by beginning town-board meetings with a prayer. Reversing the district court’s ruling, the second-circuit court decided last May that the prayers were unconstitutional. By inviting mostly Christian clergy to deliver the prayers, the town board had “impermissibly affiliated the town with a single creed, Christianity”.