New restrictions on official invocations won’t fool anybody

We suppose the city of Newport Beach had no choice when it came to

adopting a new policy that limits the religious speech of members of

the clergy invited to give invocations at council meetings.

Still, the whole notion really has left us scratching our heads.

Invocations by clergy are nothing new in America. The U.S. Senate

begins each session with a prayer from a sanctioned chaplain and city

councils and school boards across the land have begun their meetings

with a few words from a cleric, sometimes peppered in sectarian

language, for decades.

Indeed, when our national leaders are sworn into office, they put

their hand on the Bible, the holiest of Christianity’s books.

Still, the debate rages on in the courts over the separation of

church and state.

The new Newport Beach policy was born after a court ruling in the

case of Rubin vs. the city of Burbank. In that case, the late

activist Irv Rubin sued after a chaplain invoked the name of Jesus

Christ in his council invocation.

The courts agreed with Rubin and said that because the chaplain

made sectarian references to Jesus, the city was in violation of the

Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that says “Congress shall

make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting

the free exercise thereof....”

The rule at Newport Beach City Hall now is no references to Jesus

or Allah or Krishna, but just generic references to God. And city

leaders took the action to avoid legal entanglements down the road,

which we understand.

What we don’t understand is, who are we fooling here?

If a Jewish rabbi or a Christian minister or a Buddhist monk or an

Islamic imam say a prayer and makes a reference to God, is there

going to be any confusion as to which God he or she is referring?

We are not inclined nor equipped to begin arguing such matters of

church and state. But we know a little something about the First

Amendment, and the judges in the Burbank case need only read the next

line of that amendment that orders Congress also not to make law

“abridging the freedom of speech....”

And that is what has happened here in Newport Beach. Someone’s

references to a sectarian God has become so offensive that it must be

barred.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said it best:

“Religious liberty -- the freedom to proclaim a religious identity

and practice it without fear -- is an aspiration and an inalienable

right of people everywhere. When practiced with tolerance, it can be

one of the keys to a stable, productive society. But generations of

hatred may be sown when it is delayed or denied.”

If indeed there are to be invocations at city council meetings or

wherever government gathers, we have a hard time understanding how

restrictions can be put on that speech.

Making the speech bland and vanilla serves no purpose and doesn’t

fool anyone.

We say it’s better to have no invocations than to have one

shackled by the heavy dictates of government censors.