Federal court OKs prayer at Cobb commission meetings

The federal appeals court in Atlanta on Tuesday upheld Cobb County’s practice of allowing predominantly Christian prayers to open commission meetings.

By a 2-1 ruling, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it disagreed with a lawsuit’s contention that the Constitution permits only nonsectarian prayers.

Cobb’s practice allows religious leaders of all faiths to offer prayers at meetings, and the prayers do not improperly advance one religion or disparage another, the court said.

In 2005, seven Cobb residents filed a federal lawsuit seeking a halt to the practice before board of commission and planning commission meetings. Overtly Christian prayers are an unconstitutional establishment of religion, said the suit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Cobb Commission Chairman Sam Olens said he was pleased with the court’s decision and predicted the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually decide the issue.

“The county’s position has consistently been that it is constitutional to provide invocations as long as all religious faiths are included,” Olens said.

“We will continue to assure that invocations are given by members of all faiths — Buddhist, Hindu, Jews, Muslims, Christians,” he said. ” Everyone should be offered the opportunity. That’s the appropriate way to do it.”

Ayesha Khan of Americans United expressed disappointment. “We think the court was misguided in upholding plainly sectarian presentations at government meetings,” she said.

Daniel Mach, an attorney with the ACLU, said the legal team is exploring its options. He said he was pleased the 11th Circuit found unconstitutional a process used by the planning commission in 2003 and 2004 because it excluded minority faiths.

The planning commission has since adopted the same procedures used by the board of commissioners that were was upheld as constitutional.

The ruling, written by Judge Bill Pryor, said government should have no role in parsing the content of public prayers, so long as they do not advance a particular religion or disparage another.

The commissions use a master list of congregations for randomly selecting clergy to give the prayers, he noted. There also has been no showing the prayers proselytize one faith over another, and the county has not helped compose or censored any of the prayers, he said.

About 70 percent of the commissions’ prayers are Christian in nature. The prayers have included references to “Jesus,” “Allah,” “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” “Mohammed” and “Heavenly Father.”

Pryor said there is no clear consensus among the country’s appellate courts about sectarian references being uttered in prayers given at legislative meetings, such as Cobb’s commission meetings. The 11th Circuit, Pryor said, chooses not to be an “ecclesiastical arbiter” and draw a line of demarcation as to what is sectarian and what is not.

“Whether invocations of ‘Lord of Lords’ or ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Mohammed’ are ‘sectarian’ is best left to theologians, not courts of law,” Pryor added.

Lynn Hogue, a Georgia State University law professor, said the ruling correctly followed a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court precedent and recognized that, for more than 200 years, chaplains have given prayers to open Congress.

“It seems to me to be an imminently correct decision that follows applicable law and is faithful to Supreme Court precedent,” he said.

Pryor, joined by fellow 11th Circuit Judge Charles Wilson, upheld a prior ruling on the case by U.S. District Judge Richard Story in Atlanta.

U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of West Palm Beach, Fla., sitting on the 11th Circuit panel as a visiting judge, dissented.

U.S. Supreme Court precedent should not be read so broadly to allow prayers at virtually every governmental meeting, Middlebrooks said. Such prayers, he said, amount to government sponsorship and make religion “less meaningful through the hollow prayers spoken with the dual purpose of seeking a divine audience and appealing to a secular one.”