AMITE, La. — When the local public school board meets here twice a month, something extraordinary occurs.

Dozens of Christians of various denominations gather to pray on the steps of the Tangipahoa Parish School System's central office. They're praying because the men and women on the school board are bound by law to not begin their meetings with prayer. However, board members do pray privately in an anteroom prior to meetings.

In February, U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan ordered the school district to cease prayer at school-sponsored events — including board meetings — after receiving an anonymous complaint from a parent, who sought help from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Virtually every public school board in Louisiana, where counties are called parishes, begins its meetings with prayer, according to Mike Johnson, an Alliance Defense Fund attorney working on the board's appeal.

“The Louisiana School Board Association is on record as being outraged at this federal judge's opinion,” he said. “The comment from the president of that group was that all of our school boards open with an invocation. They always have. Most of them are continuing that practice in spite of this ruling.”

The board's plight has drawn national attention, and support from the Alliance Defense Fund, an evangelical Christian legal group started by public figures like James Dobson of Focus on the Family.

The board's supporters are convinced that the case will be overturned on appeal. Congress and all state legislatures open their sessions with prayer, and Johnson said public school boards follow that precedent.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has specifically confirmed that a deliberative public body can open their meetings with an invocation,” Johnson said. “This is something that is deeply embedded in the history and tradition of the country.”

The embattled school district is also facing further litigation from the ACLU, which contends that the district contravened the judge's February court order at least four times.

In one of those instances, former student teacher Cynthia Thompson contended that a fourth-grade teacher at D.C. Reeves Elementary School forced her students to pray every day before lunch. Thompson was subsequently dismissed from the teaching position, according to Joe Cook, executive director of ACLU of Louisiana.

Thompson's suit, supported by the ACLU, contends that after she objected to the prayer, her complaint was not addresed by the teacher and her supervisor at Southeastern Louisiana University. Thompson claims that in retaliation she was not given her teaching certificate.

The school board's public information office did not return the Register's calls.

Growing Disrespect

Prayer in public schools has been virtually non-existent since the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Engel v. Vitale decision in 1962 when the court held that state-mandated prayer in schools was contrary to the First Amendment's ban against the establishment of religion.

Student-led prayer is still constitutional, but the courts have highly restricted prayer involving educators, according to Richard Myers, a professor at Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“The Supreme Court also struck down an Alabama statute dealing with having a moment of silence because of the way the statute came into existence,” he said. “The court read it as if the Legislature was promoting prayer or expressing a preference for prayer.”

The ACLU's Cook contends that his organization is merely “defending religious liberty.” Prayer in the classroom or at the beginning of public school board meetings makes people feel “unwelcome unless they're fundamentalist Christians,” he said.

“But the Alliance Defense Fund's Johnson says Cook and the ACLU are “on a search-and-destroy mission to hunt down and obliterate all religious expression.

“This is what the ACLU is all about,” he explained. “He's not defending religious freedom. He's demanding a radical secularism that the Constitution doesn't require, and frankly the people of this country are not going to tolerate.”

Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things and president of the Religion and Public Life Institute, says God won't be shut out of public life.

“God is present everywhere so nobody is going to remove him from anything,” he explained. “To say that somebody should not be who they are because it will make someone feel different is a very stifling notion of the human person in society.

“We live in a democracy in which people not only have a constitutional right, but a moral obligation to honestly engage others in spaces public or private in what they believe it is important to share — including religious faith and piety,” he said.

“That is guaranteed by the Constitution, and the ACLU has, for many decades, simply turned the right on its head in order to insist there is a right in public to be free from religion, which of course, is not to be found in common sense or in the Constitution,” Father Neuhaus said.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, agreed.

Groups like the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and People for the American Way, are working to “scrub clean the public expression of religion,” he said. “There's something even more invidious going on here.”

Donohue blames a perversion of “multiculturalism.”

Said Donohue, “What we have is this growing sensitivity to Eastern religions and total disrespect for religions of the West, particularly to Christianity.”

Patrick Novecosky is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.