Suppression: Seeking Fairness

FOREIGNERS VISITING AMERICA often comment about the frequency with which we Americans play and listen to our national anthem, at seemingly all public events. We do the pledge of allegiance a lot too. The same is true of praying. We Americans do a lot of public praying, in groups. And, considering the current very conservative make up of the United States Supreme Court, it seems likelly that over the next coupleof decades at least the judicial system will be affirming the right of American's to pray under all circumstances, whenever and wherever, notwithstanding the seperation of church and state, which far right wingers sometimes argue isn't in the constitution, even though it plainly seems to be in the very first amendment thereto. throughout American istory, whenever Americans have prayed together in public in largenumbers, as they have freeuently, the prayer is invariably a Christian prayer, by default, by intent, by design. Usually the prayer is "non denominational"; you reallly can't tell whether it is being given by a Baptist or a Methodist, or whichever. And anybody in the group or crowd who happens to be non Christian, anyone who happens to be Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, or atheist, is expected to quietly participate in the prayer, if only by remaining silent. Christians have always been comfortable with that, because they greatly outnumber all the ohter non Christian faiths, and can easily ignore the non Christians in the crowd, or pretned thay aren't present, or whatever works best for them. things would be considerably different if representatives of all of other faiths started demanding equal opportunity to lead their faithful in prayer at public events in America. The Christian majority would likely be far less comfortabl with a society in which all religions were given equal time, and religious suppression, which is actually what we have in America now, were eliminated in favor of religious equality, equality of religious representation and expression Presumably, the vast majority of Christians in atendance would simply have to remain standing silently while all this took place, which in the future, it very well might. The fact is that America is becoming increasingly religiously diverse, as migration from all over the world brings other faiths to the U.S. and more people choose to embrace non Christian forms of worship and faith.