“One Nation, Under God”: An Examination of Prayer in U.S. Public Schools

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Christian myself, I should have no qualms about their presence. From this conversation, I learned to keep my mouth shut and direct my problematic liberal-tinged questions only to my diary.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America guarantees citizens, among other related things, freedom of expression and freedom of religion, as these freedoms pertain to control by the National branches of the government. Through the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court’s interpretation that the amendment’s discussion of due process applied the First Amendment to all state governments, freedom of religion became guaranteed in even more situations. These situations most certainly include public schools, as they are institutions of the state government. The Supreme Court has upheld this freedom numerous times, in such cases as Engel v. Vitale and Lemon v. Kurtzman, but proponents of school prayer continue to fight for its presence and, in cases ...

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that is stated in the First Amendment extends to state and local governments as well. This clarification is central to the school prayer debate.
Public schools in the United States, those with which we are concerned in this argument, are products of and wards of the state. As such, any promotion of prayer in a public school is a promotion of prayer by the government and, as such, is a violation of the First Amendment, as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As government agencies, public schools should be completely separated from church of any kind. A common problem on the other side of this issue argues that, by not ...

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