San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Supreme Court poised to reverse school prayer ruling 30 years later
It was Merith Weisman’s middle school graduation ceremony, and a Baptist minister stood at the front of the auditorium, announcing, “Please rise and praise Jesus for the accomplishments of these children today.” The Weismans, who are Jewish, exchanged glances. Should they stand?
Merith, in a teal dress and new black patent high heels, sat in front with the other graduates of the public Bishop Middle School in Providence, R.I. She whispered to a friend, “I don’t think that’s legal.”
Sitting in the middle of the auditorium, Merith’s parents, Daniel and Vivian Weisman, were having a similar conversation as her younger sister, 11-yearold Debbie, looked to her parents for guidance.
Daniel, a social work professor at Rhode Island College, whispered to his wife, “They can’t do this, can they?”
“No, but they are,” responded Vivian, who was confident the school was in the wrong. She was assistant executive director of the city’s Jewish Community Center and had for years volunteered on a committee of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island concerning churchstate issues.
It was 1986. The Supreme Court had ruled against allowing prayer in public schools in the early 1960s. The line, in Vivian’s view, was clear, and the school had just stepped right over it.
The Weismans, though, stood during the prayer. Daniel and Vivian didn’t want to draw attention away from the graduates. But afterward, they spoke to a school administrator and sent the school a letter — seemingly benign actions that would soon place them at the center of
the nation’s culture wars and in front of the Supreme Court.
“I always felt like this was something that happened to us, not something we did,” said Merith Weisman, now a director of community engagement at Sonoma State University in California. “They wrote a letter. That’s all, and it just took on a life of its own, and we got dragged along. Providence kept appealing.”
Thursday marked the 30th anniversary of the family’s triumph in the landmark Supreme Court ruling Lee v. Weisman, a 5-4 decision prohibiting clergy from leading graduation prayer in public schools. It comes as the Supreme Court is about to decide a new school prayer case that could reverse some of the protections from schoolbacked religious displays that the Weisman case enshrined.
The court heard oral arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District in April. The case concerns a former football coach in Bremerton, Wash., Joseph Kennedy, who claims the school district unjustly fired him for praying at midfield after each game. Kennedy contends he was exercising his right to free exercise of religion. The school district argues the coach was a representative of the school whose public prayers
put pressure on players to join him.
Given the conservative makeup of the current Supreme Court, the justices are widely expected to support the coach, undercutting Lee v. Weisman and similar Supreme Court decisions prohibiting school prayer.
Like the Kennedy case, the Weismans’ saga began with actions they never thought would make national headlines.
After Merith Weisman’s graduation, her parents approached the assistant principal in the hall. Vivian said the invocation did not belong in a public school. The assistant principal replied that he did not know what the pastor was going to say and offered no reassurance that prayers would be eliminated from future graduations. So Daniel mailed a letter to Bishop Middle School administrators, noting the separation of church and state.
“Part of my Jewish identity and civic identity is you don’t force religion on people, and you don’t force other people’s religion on people,” said Daniel in a recent interview. “I felt violated because I had to stand and bow my head.”
No one at the school responded to the letter. As Debbie’s graduation approached in 1989, Vivian periodically mentioned her concerns at PTO meetings.
After speaking with Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island, the parents decided to sue, as long as their daughters approved and the school district still refused to stop the prayers. The teens were in.
With only a week left before Debbie’s graduation, the parents met with the school’s new principal, Robert E. Lee, who did not dissuade them from suing.
Four days before graduation, the ACLU, on behalf of the family, sued
Lee and Providence schools in the U.S. District Court in Providence and sought a temporary restraining order to prevent prayers at the district’s upcoming graduations. The chief judge denied the family’s request because he wanted more time to review the case.
On graduation day,
June 20, newspapers, TV and radio reporters gathered at the school. Rabbi Leslie Gutterman of Temple Beth-El in Providence delivered the prayers to the 127 graduates. He said he made the prayers nonsectarian.
In January 1990, the chief judge of the Providence federal court ruled that prayer at public school graduations violated the First Amendment. The Providence School Board appealed. That July, the Weismans won again in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit in Boston.
Three months later, the school board appealed again.
Then before the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority that schools placed “subtle and indirect public and peer pressure on attending students to stand as a group or maintain respectful silence during the invocation and benediction.”