Mandatory Prayer in Mississippi

I think Antonin Scalia is behind the last year's spate of blatantly unconstitutional atni-abortion and religion-establishing laws and policies in the Stupid States.

He's so sure that once these cases reach his bench, all that First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment bullshit will get the Supreme Court heave-ho it so richly deserves.

Scott Keyes at Think Progress:

A high school in central Mississippi finds itself in court after allegedly holding a mandatory religious assembly earlier this month.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed by the American Humanist Association on Wednesday, students were given no advance notice about the nature of the assembly, but were told that attendance was required. It soon became clear, however, when a member of Pinelake Baptist Church opened his presentation by talking about finding hope in Jesus Christ.

The assembly allegedly also warned students against premarital sex, pornography, and homosexuality. As the lawsuit detailed, the program included a video of four speakers explaining how their troubled lives had been saved by Christianity:

SNIP 

Soon after, “the assembly immediately turned into a full-blown lecture on the supposed miracles, powers, and teachings of Jesus Christ and the Church Representative encouraged all students to find sanctity in him,” and no one was permitted to leave. “The School’s truancy officer, Jeff White (“Officer White”), harassed several students who attempted to leave and told them to sit back down,” read the complaint.

According to the complaint, the school repeated the same assembly for 11th graders on April 10. A few juniors had been tipped off that it would be a religious assembly and “attempted to go to the library or another classroom instead but they were prevented from doing so by Officer White.” A third mandatory assembly was held this Monday for 10th graders, the suit alleges.

The Supreme Court ruled more than 50 years ago in Engel v Vitale that school-led prayer is an unconstitutional infringement on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, a decision they reaffirmed in the 1992 case Lee v. Weisman.

What I find most amazing about all the various attempts to force high-school students to listen to freakazoid lies and stupidity is that the school and state officials involved have failed to learn the most basic fact about adolescents:

The quickest way to get teenagers to reject something is to make it mandatory.