To the Editor:

Re “Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer” (news article, Jan. 27), about a successful lawsuit brought by Jessica Ahlquist, a 16-year-old atheist in Cranston, R.I.:

There are only six words in the text posted on the wall of Cranston High School West that are the cause of the problem. They are “School Prayer,” “Our Heavenly Father” and “Amen.” Take them out. The text can then read, with slight modification:

“May we each day desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers, to be honest with ourselves as well as with others. May we be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win. May we value true friendship and always conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West.”

Who could possibly object to that?

JOHN WILLENBECHER

New York, Jan. 27, 2012





To the Editor:

Jessica Ahlquist was right to challenge the constitutionality of a prayer permanently painted on the wall of her school auditorium, and the federal court in Rhode Island was right to order the prayer removed. But her complaint that the prayer was a personal affront that sent her the message “you don’t belong here” merely reflects the wrongheaded psychological turn in current Establishment Clause thinking and misses the real constitutional point.

A lot of things in high school lead individual students to feel that they don’t belong, from bureaucratic rigidity to intellectual stultification to football mania. But such sources of teenage alienation are not unconstitutional. One point of the Establishment Clause, however, is that religion is too important, indeed too sacred, to be trusted to the crude, trivializing and often opportunistic hands of government.

This old idea might challenge the sureties of both Ms. Ahlquist and her impiously intemperate opponents, but it provides a surer foundation for the separation of church and state than the subjective discomfort of a single student.