{"id":754,"date":"2012-12-16T18:19:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-16T18:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/2012\/12\/16\/lack-of-school-prayer-is-no-villain-here"},"modified":"2012-12-16T18:19:00","modified_gmt":"2012-12-16T18:19:00","slug":"lack-of-school-prayer-is-no-villain-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=754","title":{"rendered":"Lack of school prayer is no villain here"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n<p>I no longer can stand by while some of my fellow Americans start laying blame for the Connecticut school massacre on the lack of officially sanctioned prayer in school.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve seen it on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets. What happened in Newtown, Conn., was an evil act that utterly defies human understanding. Twenty-seven lives were snuffed out by what one TV commentator called an act committed by \u201cSatan himself.\u201d Indeed.<\/p>\n<p>Would this have happened had the federal court system ruled in the 1960s that school-sponsored prayer didn\u2019t violate the Constitution\u2019s prohibition against it? My guess is that it would.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s understand what the courts ruled. The Supreme Court \u2013 led by Chief Justice Earl Warren \u2013 did not ban prayer in school. It did declare that teachers, principals and other public school authorities \u2013 as agents of the state \u2013 cannot <em>order<\/em> kids to pray. The First Amendment lays it out clearly: There shall be no law that establishes a state religion and there should be no prohibition of the \u201cfree exercise thereof.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The bottom line is that students are free to pray whenever they wish. And students do pray to whichever deity they worship. That is their right and no one can deny it to them.<\/p>\n<p>No, blame for the hideous massacre in Newtown doesn\u2019t belong to judges who ruled correctly on school prayer. It is infinitely more complex than that. <\/p>\n<p>Many other things have occurred throughout our society in the five decades since the court banned mandated public school prayer. We need to examine all of them, collectively and individually, and search within our own souls on how to prevent recurrences of the tragedy that overwhelms us.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I no longer can stand by while some of my fellow Americans start laying blame for the Connecticut school massacre on the lack of officially sanctioned prayer in school. I\u2019ve seen it on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets. What happened in Newtown, Conn., was an evil act that utterly defies human understanding. Twenty-seven &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=754\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Lack of school prayer is no villain here<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}