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Scalia Rebukes Justices on Prayer Case

Posted by Jeff (Guest) jeff@attoz.com - Tuesday, April 27 2004, 2:08:21 (CEST) from 69.14.124.228 - d14-69-228-124.try.wideopenwest.com Commercial - Windows XP - Netscape Website: Website title:

Scalia Rebukes Justices on Prayer Case 49 minutes ago Add U.S. National - AP to My Yahoo! By ANNE GEARAN WASHINGTON - Two of the Supreme Court's most conservative members delivered an unusual public rebuke to more liberal justices Monday, accusing them of ducking an important church-state fight over mealtime prayers at a taxpayer-funded military college. Justice Antonin Scalia (news - web sites), joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, said the court should have taken the case to answer for the first time whether its ban on school-sponsored prayer for young children and high schoolers applies to college students as well. Scalia delivered a polite but blunt critique of what he suggested are flimsy reasons for avoiding an appeal on behalf of the Virginia Military Institute, which is part of the state's university system. The VMI case also gave the court an opportunity to rule on the constitutionality of traditional religious observance in military institutions, Scalia said. "The weighty questions raised by petitioners ... deserve this court's attention," he wrote in protest. Writing separately, Justice John Paul Stevens (news - web sites) countered that the VMI case may be important, but suffers from procedural and other problems. He said Scalia is "quite wrong" in his characterization of why the court rejected the case. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (news - web sites) and Stephen Breyer (news - web sites) joined Stevens. With the Supreme Court rebuff, the ruling of a lower court stands. That court said the nightly prayers violate the Constitution's ban on state promotion of religion. The court already is considering a major case about religion in schools. Justices are expected to rule by summer on whether the current wording of the Pledge of Allegiance, with its reference to "one nation under God," can legally be recited in public schools. Scalia recused himself from that case because of remarks that seemed to prejudge the case. At VMI, the mess hall prayers, one for each night of the week except Saturday, were recited by a student chaplain. The prayers concluded with the phrase, "Now, O God, we receive this food and share this meal together with thanksgiving. Amen." Two cadets asked the school to change the prayer ceremony. They sued when VMI refused. Since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has outlawed official prayer in a variety of public school settings, including classrooms and at high school graduations. The court has pointed to the special circumstances of grade schools and high schools, with their many rules, enforced attendance and young pupils. By contrast, college students are usually adults and attend school by choice. The state of Virginia asked the high court to reinstate a decades-old VMI practice of saying grace before the evening meal. The school was the subject of a previous, hard-fought Supreme Court case over its all-male admissions policy. VMI lost that case in 1996, as Scalia noted dryly in his dissent Monday. "VMI has previously seen another of its traditions abolished by this court," he wrote. "This time, however, its cause has been ignored rather than rejected — though the consequences will be just the same." Scalia voted in favor of VMI in the earlier case. Although he did not say how he would have voted this time, he appeared to tip his hand. Prayer at a military college is more likely to be constitutional than prayer at a nonmilitary one, "since group prayer before military mess is more traditional than group prayer at ordinary state colleges," he wrote. The back-and-forth between Scalia and Stevens offered a rare glimpse inside the secretive selection process for Supreme Court cases. The court chooses to hear only a small percentage of all the cases sent to it. By tradition, at least four justices must agree that a given case is worthwhile. The justices vote behind closed doors. Debate over a prospective case may be vigorous or nonexistent, but to the outside world the result almost always appears the same: A simple, one-sentence notice that "the petition for a writ of certiorari is granted," or, far more often, denied. By dissenting in the VMI case, Scalia and Rehnquist revealed that, at most, they were able to collect just one additional vote to hear the case. The justices in the court's ideological middle, Sandra Day O'Connor (news - web sites) and Anthony M. Kennedy, did not reveal their votes. One reason to reject the case, Stevens said, was the lack of a clear division among lower appeals courts that have considered similar issues about campus prayer. Such splits often lead the Supreme Court to get involved and make the law uniform nationwide. Scalia pounced on that reasoning, and he came close to calling his colleagues hypocrites. Of course, there are no cases precisely like the VMI case because there are no institutions precisely like VMI, Scalia wrote. The case is Bunting v. Mellen, 03-863. ___ On the Net: Supreme Court order, including dissents: http://wid.ap.org/documents/scotus/040426bunting.pdf Virginia Military Institute: http://www.vmi.edu 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites): http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/ --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic: Scalia Rebukes Justices on Prayer Case Jeff - Tuesday, April 27 2004, 2:08:21 (CEST) Re: Scalia Rebukes Justices on Prayer Case parhad - 04/27 03:06

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