Jones v. Clear Creek School District (1992)
Supreme Court Decisions on Religious Liberty
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Background Information
The Clear Creek Independent School district passed a resolution allowing high school seniors to vote for student volunteers to deliver nonsectarian, nonproselytizing religious invocations at their graduation ceremonies. The policy allowed, but did not require, such a prayer, ultimately leaving it to the senior class to decide by majority vote. The resolution also called for the school officials to review the statement before presentation to ensure that it was indeed nonsectarian and nonproselytizing.
Court Decision
The Fifth Circuit Court applied the three prongs of the Lemon test and found that:
The Resolution has a secular purpose of solemnization, that the Resolution's primary effect is to impress upon graduation attendees the profound social significance of the occasion rather than advance or endorse religion, and that Clear Creek does not excessively entangle itself with religion by proscribing sectarianism and proselytization without prescribing any form of invocation.
What is odd is that, in the decision, the Court admits that the practical result will be exactly what the Lee decision did not permit:
...the practical result of this decision, viewed in light of Lee , is that a majority of students can do what the State acting on its own cannot do to incorporate prayer in public high school graduation ceremonies.
Significance
This decision seems a contradiction to the decision in Lee v. Weisman, and indeed the Supreme Court ordered the Fifth Circuit Court to review its decision in light of Lee. But the Court ended up standing by its original judgment.
A number of things are not explained in this decision, however. For example, why is prayer in particular singled out as a form of "solemnizing," and it is really just a coincidence that a Christian form of solemnization is picked? Why is such a thing put up to a student vote when exactly that is least likely to take into account the needs of minority students? And why is the government permitted to decide for others what does and does not qualify as "permitted" prayer?
It was because of that last point that the Ninth Circuit Court came to a different conclusion in Cole v. Oroville.
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