Atheist group demands California city stop allowing prayers at meetings
A prominent atheist organization has sent a complaint letter to a city in California demanding that it stop opening meetings with a prayer.
The Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a complaint letter on April 6 to officials in Huntington Beach, including Mayor Tony Strickland, regarding its opposition to their decision to allow prayers at meetings.
According to FFRF Staff Attorney Christopher Line, a concerned resident of Huntington Beach alerted the organization about the invocations and some of the “squabbles between the council and the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council, [which] has traditionally been in charge of deciding who leads invocations before meetings.”
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“We share the concerns of community members and members of the interfaith council that these proposed changes will lead to members of one faith being selected to deliver prayer more often than others,” wrote Line.
“The issues and concerns that the council is dealing with regarding its opening prayer practice perfectly illustrate that government prayer is an unnecessary entanglement of religion with our secular government and why the practice should be dropped altogether.”
Line demanded city officials “cease opening its meetings with prayer, or at the very least, implement a moment of silence that would allow all residents to reflect in their own way, according to the dictates of their personal beliefs without input from government-designated religious leaders or city officials.”
“If the city council does continue to host prayer at public meetings, the council must not discriminate against any person wishing to give a prayer,” he continued. “The nonreligious and members of minority religions must be permitted to deliver invocations as well.”
Recently, Strickland and Huntington Beach Councilwoman Gracey Van Der Mark called for a new policy on meeting invocations that strictly regulate who can give invocations, and remove the duty from the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council.
This proposed change to the invocation policy was reportedly being considered out of concern over the content of the invocations, which some have alleged were too political in nature.
However, Councilman Dan Kalmick told media outlet Voice of OC that he believed the proposed changes were a “manufactured issue” and opened the council up to the possibility of legal action.
“This is manufactured outrage. The fact that the mayor stated that hundreds of people have reached out to him sounds like a lie to me. We haven’t gotten a single email,” said Kalmick.
“I don’t want the city to be in the business of selecting religious leaders and certifying them for an invocation, it just opens us to liability. … If we’re going to have a problem with it, we should just get rid of the invocation altogether.”
In 2014, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Town of Greece v. Galloway that a New York municipality could have overtly Christian prayers open their official meetings.
Since that decision, however, there continue to be periodic legal controversies over official meeting invocations and the policies that local governments create to regulate them.
For example, last year, the city of Parkersburg, West Virginia, was ordered to cease its tradition of reciting the Lord’s Prayer before official city council meetings and to pay $60,000 in attorney fees and other costs.
U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver Jr., an appointee of President Gerald Ford, contrasted the Town of Greece decision with Parkersburg’s prayer practice, as Greece had clergy of different backgrounds give an invocation on behalf of officials rather than the same specific Christian prayer every meeting.
