Missouri to Vote on Prayer Amendment as Critics Warn of Legal Nightmares
Missourians will vote tomorrow on a proposed amendment to the state constitution that supporters say would protect residents' right to pray in public, and if a recent poll is any indication, it could pass by a mammoth margin.
Supporters say the so-called "right to pray" ballot measure—known as Amendment 2—better defines Missourians' First Amendment rights and will help to protect the state's Christians, about 80 percent of the population, who they say are under siege in the public square.
Opponents, meanwhile, say that the religious protections Amendment 2 would offer are already guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution, and that it will open the door to all manner of unintended and costly consequences including endless taxpayer-funded lawsuits.
State Rep. Chris Kelly, a Democrat who opposed the original legislation, called Amendment 2 "a jobs bill for lawyers."
The measure has already provoked lawsuits over its ballot wording, which plaintiffs argue is a Trojan horse attack on the state's 200-year-old protections for religious minorities, public education and church-state separation. Those lawsuits failed in Missouri's courts, and the measure's ballot wording will stand as written.
A poll by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of 625 registered Missouri voters found that if the primary had been held last week, 82 percent would have voted in favor of Amendment 2, while just 14 percent would have voted "no," with 4 percent undecided.
State Rep. Mike McGhee, a Republican, unsuccessfully sponsored the legislation that led to Amendment 2 for years before seeing it pass in the 2011 legislative session.
Last May, he told the Post-Dispatch that if the measure passes it would "send a message" that "it's OK to read a Bible in study hall" or "to pray briefly before a City Council meeting."
McGhee's pastor, the Rev. Terry Hodges of First Baptist Church in Odessa, said he had spoken with McGhee through the years about the legislation. He said that if Amendment 2 passes, it will "level the playing field."
Hodges said Christians "enjoyed home-field advantage" for the country's first 150 years. "That's changed, and now there's a hostility toward Christians," he said.
Karen Aroesty of the Anti-Defamation League of Missouri and Southern Illinois said the 4 percent of Missouri believers who are non-Christian would find that hard to believe.
"That the majority is claiming to be persecuted is simply absurd," Aroesty said. "It boggles the mind that they say they are under attack."
Opponents say wording in the amendment that would "ensure that any person shall have the right to pray individually or corporately in a private or public setting" without disturbing the peace or disrupting a public meeting, opens the door to sectarian prayers at governmental meetings.
Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State have questioned how disturbance or disruption would later be defined. What if one person's "right to pray" intrudes on another's right to abstain from prayer, or to pray according to the tenets of his or her own faith?
Charles Haynes, a senior scholar with the nonpartisan First Amendment Center in Washington, said while the proposed amendment "reaffirms legislative prayers for government bodies, it doesn't make clear that if those prayers are regularly of one particular faith, the practice would likely be struck down as unconstitutional."
Star Trek Into Darkness
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Pilgrim Progress
Christian Fundamentalist "Dominionists" are as offensive, agressive, and abusive as any other group of religionists struggling to keep their monopoly on the public expression of THEIR religion. Just as offensive as "Jewish Nation" or "Muslim Nation" bigotry. Do the people of Missouri really think there will be any Democracy in the choice of public prayers? Never. Christian Fundamentalists, as always, will seek to bash other people with their prayers. They already do. When you pray "in Jesus name, amen." you are as undemocratic and abusive as if they passed out prayer rugs or rosaries at City Hall for their next City Council Meeting. Do you want the Jews to demand you put on a yarmulke for the prayers at your teeneager's high school assemblies? Why not? Christians have been shoving their religon down the public's throat for about 200 years....do you want to now have to "be fair" and be forced to petition Allah before that Friday night school football game?
Jack Ratekin
And now a mosque has been fire-bombed in Joplin. Yet some still claim that the Christians are the ones being persecuted and repressed. I don't remember any Christian churches being fire-bombed lately.
Steve Skeete
Christians in America believe they are losing long held freedoms and that most Americans could not care less. Among them are religious groups who are against evangelization, the anti-religious who would like religion removed from the market place of ideas and confined to heart and home, foreign religions for whom a diminution of Christian faith would be an advantage, and the so-called "liberal churches" for whom religious freedom has given way to the fight for the establishment of personal "rights". Another group pf persons who seem to have no reason to care about Christian freedoms is the Courts. It appears that the courts, in the effort to build a pluralistic society and emulate the Europeans, have tended more and more to dismiss as irrelevant long held Christian beliefs. Christians now fear that they have to fight for their own constitution which today's jurist regard as a"living document" which had a Christian past but now face an uncertain future if all faiths must now be equal.