The Supreme Court: Voluntary Prayer?

At milk-and-cookies time each morning, the kindergarten pupils of New York City’s P.S. 184 recited a childish grace: “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food. Amen.” Each afternoon they prayed:

Thank you for the world so sweet,

Thank you for the food we eat,

Thank you for the birds that sing—

Thank you, God, for everything.

In 1962, Principal Elihu Oshinsky stopped the prayers in keeping with the Supreme Court’s decisions against compulsory religious exercises in public schools. Appalled, 15 parents—Protestant, Catholic and Jewish—organized PRAY (Prayer Rights for American Youth) and sued in federal court, claiming that their tots had a constitutional right to “voluntary” school expression of “their love and affection for Almighty God.”

Voluntary? Not quite, countered Principal Oshinsky. The teachers taught those five-year-olds to say those prayers, which means, he said, official coercion, however benign. When the case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, it avoided the voluntary question by ruling simply that the First Amendment does not compel a state to let citizens pray in a state-owned facility whenever they wish to do so. Judge Henry J. Friendly told PRAY: “The plaintiffs must content themselves with having their children say these prayers before 9 a.m. and after 3 p.m.”

Last week the Supreme Court silently refused to review PRAY’s appeal from Judge Friendly’s decision. Though it signifies neither approval nor disapproval, the court’s action suggests that it has no intention of reconsidering its original prayer decisions—a move for which PRAY’s “voluntary” argument might have opened the way. As a result, the only prayers still permissible in U.S. public schools are those that a student says to himself.