HUTCHINSON, Kan. » The tradition of ministers offering a Christian prayer before Reno County Commission meetings could come to an end after the commission received a letter from a national organization saying a resident had complained about the practice.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State notified the commission last week that it had received a complaint about the prayer tradition. Commissioners said at Tuesday’s meeting that they likely would have to agree to change the tradition, The Hutchinson News reported.
(Protests in Hawaii prompted the state Senate and House to modify their practices on holding prayer before sessions.)
The letter to the Reno commission from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, signed by the Washington, D.C., organization’s legal director, Ayesha Khan, cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prayers at the opening of legislative meetings are constitutionally permissible only if "they do not use language specific to one religion."
The group said it found that 14 prayers offered before meetings from Dec. 6, 2011, to March 30 of this year invoked the name of Jesus Christ.
"Probably 95 percent of the people in the community have no problem with that," Commissioner Dan Deming said. "But we’re going to have to be politically correct and correct under the Supreme Court ruling, and I don’t like it.
"I think it’s insulting to ask ministers who are Jesus-oriented to do a nonsectarian prayer, but we are going to have to comply," Deming said.
Commission Chairman James Schlickau said ministers who have offered the prayers would be asked whether they would consider offering a nonsectarian prayer.
"If their thought is they don’t want to do that, we might go to have a moment of silence instead," Schlickau said.
The Hutchinson City Council also offers prayers before its meetings but has not received a similar letter, City Manager John Deardoff said.
Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the organization doesn’t normally get involved in such cases unless it receives a complaint from within the community.
The organization’s letter asks the county commission to respond within 30 days on what action it plans to take. Boston said the organization occasionally files lawsuits in such cases.
"But our preferred method is to open a dialogue and talk to the relevant officials and explain the law," Boston said.
In Hawaii, Mitchell Kahle, founder of Hawaii Citizens for the Separation of State and Church, has objected that prayers to open daily sessions of the Legislature are unconstitutional.
The Senate changed its rules last year, no longer requiring an invocation to open its daily order of business. The state House makes invocations optional, limits them to two minutes and prohibits them from being used to proselytize, advance or disparage any religion or point of view.
Kahle and associate Kevin Hughes reached a $100,000 out-of-court settlement with the state last month to a lawsuit by Kahle and Hughes that said Capitol security personnel roughed them up after Kahle objected to a prayer in the Senate chamber in 2010.
