In the 1990s, when Congress was embarking on yet another reckless attempt to legislate public prayer in public schools, the Republican senator from Oregon, Mark O. Hatfield, asked for the floor. Hatfield, an evangelical and lifelong Baptist, testified that he had frequently prayed in school — typically before math tests.
His point was that, contrary to fevered rhetoric to the contrary, neither the Constitution nor the Supreme Court outlawed prayer in schools. The issue was prescribed or compulsory prayer in public schools, an issue that has reared its ugly head once again in a case from Washington state.
Public prayer in public schools should have been dispatched once and for all decades, even centuries, ago, initially by the First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”— and certainly by Supreme Court rulings in the early 1960s that struck down prescribed prayer and mandatory Bible reading in public education.
