WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court Monday rejected the appeal of a Utah man whose request to give the opening prayer at a city council meeting was turned down because of its unusual content.
The court, without comment, refused to hear Tom Snyder's argument that the Murray City Council unlawfully favored one religion over another by rejecting his proposed prayer."The danger is we get government-approved prayers and we get government-censored prayers," Snyder's attorney, Brian Barnard, said Monday.
Barnard said he plans to ask the court for a rehearing in light of a March 18 appeals court ruling in a Cleveland School Board case that he said contradicts the ruling the high court left intact Monday.
The 10th Circuit Appeals Court ruled for the city, saying Snyder's planned prayer was more of a "political harangue" that fell outside this nation's "long-accepted genre of legislative prayer."
Snyder's proposed prayer was addressed to "our mother, who art in heaven (if, indeed there is a heaven and if there is a god that takes a woman's form)." It asked "that you deliver us from the evil of forced religious worship" and questioned "if in fact you had a son that visited Earth."
The Salt Lake City Council dropped its practice of opening meetings with an invocation rather than allow Snyder to offer his prayer. Later, in March 1994, he asked Murray officials to let him say the prayer to open a City Council meeting.
The city attorney told him the prayer "is not a time to express political views (or) attack city policies or practices." City officials refused to let Snyder offer an invocation but said he could give the prayer during the council meeting's public comment period.
Snyder, of South Salt Lake, sued, saying the council's action violated the Constitution's First Amendment ban on government establishment of religion. A federal judge ruled against him, as did the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appeals court said traditional "legislative prayer" involves "nonsectarian requests for wisdom and solemnity, as well as calls for divine blessing on the work of the legislative body." Prayers that promote a particular religious creed or disparage another creed can be rejected without violating the Constitution, the appeals court said.
In the appeal acted Monday, Snyder's lawyers said the city cannot discriminate between religious ideas.
"It's sure not something that makes me happy," said Barnard of the ruling. "The idea of separation of church and state is so government does not become the controller of people's prayers or the content of people's prayers and that's exactly what's happened here."
The case is Snyder vs. Murray City, 98-1193.