Our founders had their different faiths, and with those faiths as guides
They determined that our government should not be taking sides

That couplet, excerpted from this earlier verse, is the crux of the matter in Greece, NY. In the most recent must-read piece, SCOTUSblog, and author Carl Esbeck, dissects the matter of the case (I’ll only briefly quote here–the whole thing is well worth the time):

Can government knowingly take sides in a matter of religious belief or practice? More to the point, can government actively support a practice that is explicitly religious, such as prayer? This is the issue in Town of Greece v. Galloway as it ought to be framed.

Quoting with approval from Marsh v. Chambers, the Town’s main brief states that the purpose of legislative prayer is “[t]o invoke Divine guidance on a public body entrusted with making the laws.” The practice not only calls upon a God or gods, but to a Divinity interested and active in human affairs. Why else invoke guidance? This act of prayer is thus consistent with some religions but not others. Deists, for example, believe in an impersonal God. A policy of legislative prayer is doubtlessly taking a side, and no phony pluralism dressed up as “nonsectarian” prayer – a vague theism not actually practiced by anyone – can cover up that fact.

The ubiquitous internet commenters who point to Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists love to claim that the first amendment is not intended to protect government from religion, but to limit government meddling and thus protect religion from government. Esbeck’s piece painstakingly explains why the protection of government from church is protection of church from government.

The divisiveness within the body politic that is a proper concern starts when government takes sides in favor of an explicitly religious practice. Political struggle will likely ensue to seize control of the machinery of government. The purpose for which factions seek control is that the one in power decides the question of continued favoritism of the religious practice. The solution, however, is not to suppress the political struggle which is protected free speech. The solution is to fix the cause of the divisiveness, namely for the courts to start enforcing the taking-sides rule.

Political divisiveness is thus not itself a violation of the Establishment Clause. But it’s a warning sign that the taking-sides rule has gone neglected. Of course, divisiveness within the larger civil society will continue. That’s just pluralism. What will subside is the struggle to seize the levers of power with the aim of controlling whether government continues to take sides in favor of a religious practice.

Mind you, so long as the majority is winning, won’t they be fine with that? What’s to persuade the Christian majority in Greece that the invocation isn’t a good thing despite the entanglement?

In Greece, N.Y., religion prays at the suffrage of the Town Board. The Board, in turn, sought to invoke God’s guidance. But that’s not what the Board got. It instead got an invocation open to all willing locals, including Wiccans and atheists, who, because the Board could not be censorious prayer police, were permitted to say (pray?) whatever they wanted. How did things go so far astray? Presumably because the Board was following advice of legal counsel to “do prayer” federal judges would uphold. In the end, religion was corrupted. That was preventable by a government attentive to Establishment Clause dos and don’ts.

Once you let one in, you let them all in, and you run the risk (as happened recently in Arizona) of an improper and inadequate prayer by the “wrong” people, which you then have to make up for with additional invocations. Of course, then, any other religion must have the same right to make up for your prayer with one of their own, and so on, and so on… And it could not be more clear that these invocations are absolutely not for the benefit of the town, but for the purposes of the churches themselves.

Ultimately religion does not exist to sustain the political order. It’s not a program for municipal improvement or to bless those who take up civic duties. When government uses religion as a tool to achieve its political goals, the danger to religion is that it becomes a courtier in the halls of State.

One task that falls to governments
Of each of our united states
Is regulating new designs
That ornament our license plates.
Some groups are favored: some are not—
You know the trouble this creates—
And governments start taking sides
(in search of votes) in these debates.
Wisconsin, now, will be the scene
As two designs await their fates
Will Madison, this week, approve
“In God We Trust”? The nation waits.

If you want to support the Veterans Trust Fund in Wisconsin, the good news is that there may soon be a license plate you can buy to donate to the group and publicly show your support. The bad news is, if you are an atheist and want to support the VTF, your public support will come with “In God We Trust” on this special license plate.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is taking issue with an “In God We Trust” license plate that soon could be available in Wisconsin.

“It sends an exclusionary message,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, the Madison-based group’s co-president and co-founder. “First of all, if a non-believer wanted to help out veterans they are going to be precluded from buying this plate. This is obviously an attempt to push religion.”

An attempt to push religion? Of course not… not when viewed from the privileged perspective of a religious majority:

The initial $15 cost of the plate will be donated to the state’s Veterans Trust Fund. Each additional year, a $25 donation will be paid by the license plate owner, with the money going toward the state Department of Veterans Affairs for the care of residents in the state’s veterans homes.

A bill sponsor, Rep. Dean Kaufert, R-Neenah, said he doesn’t think the state’s offering of the license plate is too close a connection or blurring any lines between church and state.

“Nobody is being forced to get one,” Kaufert said. “This is on a completely voluntary basis.”

The state is simply taking the position that anyone who cares enough to donate to the Veterans Trust Fund must necessarily be a good, God-fearing, all-American sort. No one is forcing the unpatriotic, godless veteran-haters to buy a plate.

How could that possibly be blurring a church/state line?