Contradictory Pieties

When the Supreme Court outlawed school prayers nearly ten years ago, it set loose an entire American cosmology of angels and devils and libertarians and ministers and pedants. Had the perversion of law really come to such a pass of depravity that children would be forbidden to pray? What of the separation of church and state? Religious and constitutional pieties contradicted one another. The emotional and the rational battled in politicians' minds.

The ironies were multiplied last week when the House of Representatives met to vote on a constitutional amendment that would have allowed "voluntary prayer" in the nation's public schools. The national currency declares, "In God We Trust," and each day in the House and Senate commences with prayer. To vote against the idea was, emotionally at least, heretical. But as Utah Representative K. Gunn McKay, a Mormon elder, said, "I do not want Government tampering with my faith." Ohio's Samuel L. Devine replied: "The courts say you can read dirty books but can't pray in school."

Finally and somewhat unexpectedly, the House voted to kill the amendment, largely because of the skilled opposition of New York's ancient Emanuel Celler, 83, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. A majority of 240 to 162 favored it but that was 28 votes short of the required two-thirds. Remarkably, a considerable lobby of churchmen opposed the idea. They argued that children --and their parents--can pray at home and, more substantively, that the churches in America have flourished under the First Amendment, which would have been weakened by the proposed change.

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