"Public Prayer is Always Coercian"

The Rude One is, unlike the Supremes, completely on point here, so read the whole thing.

He concludes:

Public prayer is not a blithe, harmless, almost passive activity. It separates the believers from the non-believers, and it always implies that one should be behaving in a certain way. It forces you to conform or resist in settings where such pressures need not exist. Yeah, it's a fuck of a lot easier to say, "Kiss my ass. I'm sittin' out your prayer" in a large city. But in a small town, like Greece, or, perhaps, in the future, in a Southern classroom, it's an imposition on the freedom of others who want to go to secular things without having someone slap you in the face with their Christ butt plug.

The Rude Pundit has said it before and will say it again: "Freedom of religion" also means "freedom from religion."

Quick P.S. here: You know who offered an amicus brief in support of the praying rights of the Grecian people? The Obama administration. Yeah, the Solicitor General pretty much laid out everything Kennedy needed to say, so, you know, obviously the next State of the Union will start with an Islamic call to prayer.