First Baptist's Robert Jeffress Wants Supreme Court to Let Him Praise Jesus at City Hall

[TexasTowelie]

At the outset of the most recent meeting of the Dallas City Council, Councilman Sheffie Kadane stepped to the dais and delivered the following prayer:

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the gorgeous day You've given us today. Guide us year-round to serve the Lord, let us glorify You in all that we do. Let us bless You and praise You in all of our deals here today at the council, amendments and whatnot.

Lord, be with our mayor, guide him, lead him in doing a great job for a great city. Be with all our men in blue. Guide them, keep them all safe from harm and evil. Take care of us now, Lord. Teach us what You want us to know. Let us do Your will in all that we do.

In Christ's name, amen.

No one raised any objection to the invocation's decidedly Christian slant, not Councilman Lee Kleinman, an active member of Temple Emanu-El and the editor of a book on Gelfite Fish for Dummies, and not anyone in the audience, which at that early hour was somewhere between sparse and nonexistent.

Perhaps it was because Kadane's request for wisdom and guidance was inoffensively anodyne; maybe it was that similar invocations are delivered before every council meeting, albeit usually by a visiting pastor rather than a sitting council member. (We've asked the mayor's office for any guidelines that are in place). The lack of objection, however, doesn't necessarily make Kadane's remarks constitutional.

That's what the Supreme Court is currently debating in Town of Greece v. Galloway, a case in which two women -- a Jew and an atheist -- sued a New York municipality claiming that its pre-meeting invocations, which, in the eight years before the legal challenge, were always delivered by Christians, amounted to an unconstitutional establishment of religion by the state.

More at http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/11/robert_jeffress_prayer_supreme.php .