Huntsville City Council 3-2012

Council President Mark Russell (right) leads Huntsville City Council in opening prayer during a March 8, 2012, council meeting. Soon afterwards, council members agreed to transfer responsibility to lining up people to offer invocations that would come closer to reflecting the diversity of beliefs of Huntsville citizens and to come closer to passing Constitutional standards. (The Huntsville Times file / Bob Gathany)

(Bob Gathany Gathany, Bob 337-0956)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Freedom of religion apparently only goes so far in Huntsville.

Blake Kirk, a Wiccan priest who had been scheduled to offer the prayer tonight, June 26, 2014, at the Huntsville City Council meeting, was notified Wednesday that the invitation had been rescinded. Kirk was un-invited, said city attorney Peter Joffrion, because of phone calls from citizens alarmed about Kirk's faith once the agenda was made public on Tuesday. Kirk had been listed on the agenda as "Priest of the Oak, Ash and Thorn tradition of Wicca."

"We decided to pull back, to do some education maybe, and to introduce him more gently at another time," Joffrion said, adding that the decision to rescind Kirk's invitation aimed to ensure that the invocation would remain a time of focus and coming together, not a point of contention.

The meeting began with a moment of silence.

Decisions about who will offer the invocation are made by Joffrion and by the Rev. Frank Broyles, a minister to the community from Faith Presbyterian Church and longtime respected leader through the Interfaith Mission Service, said Council President Mark Russell.

"We handed all that over," Russell said Thursday.

The invocation would have been Kirk's second for the City Council. Kirk said that there were no objections or discussions before or after his Jan. 23, 2014, invocation. He said he began that prayer something like, "O gentle Goddess and Loving God," and delivered a prayer meant to solemnize the event, and not to showcase his own faith or to call attention to himself. Broyles had listed Kirk on that agenda as a "leader in earth-based spiritual communities."

"I guess somebody got the collywobbles," Blake Kirk said Thursday afternoon. "Although this has been an attempt by the city to increase the diversity of those delivering the invocations, apparently diversity only goes so far. But the fact is, the First Amendment protects my right to practice my religion as much as anyone else. And governments are not supposed to pick and choose or to favor one religion over any other."

Kirk said he hopes the incident will be resolved in a way that helps people to see there is nothing "weird" or "threatening" about his faith.

"I hope there are no adverse results about this for Frank (Broyles) or the Interfaith Mission Service," Kirk said Thursday night. "I expect the decision was made with an intent to do the right thing for what they thought were good reasons, but, whatever their intention, it becomes overt religious discrimination."

2012 legal challenge

Since a 2012 objection to the nearly uniformly Christian nature of the council's public prayers from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the council asked Broyles to take the responsibility of extending invitations to a diversity of religious leaders to avoid the unconstitutional establishment of a particular religion by a government body. The goal is to more faithfully reflect the diversity of beliefs in Huntsville. Surveys show that, while about 75 percent of citizens in the Tennessee Valley do identify themselves as "Christian," at least 25 percent of all citizens follow several other faiths or none at all.

Since January 2014, according to the agendas listed at the city website, all of the prayers have been offered by Christian ministers with the exception of Kirk's prayer and one other offered by a rabbi. Since 2012, prayers have also been offered by Muslim leaders, Broyles said, and in the next two months, a Hindu and a Buddhist leader have been scheduled.

"It's a navigation," Broyles said, "and we're learning as we navigate. But it's a goal worth pursuing. Diverse voices in prayer can contribute to the narrowing of the great divide fed by the bitterness and polarizing extremes growing in public life today."