A Prayer By Any Other Name

WITH LITTLE FANFARE, the New Jersey Legislature last week approved a bill requiring public schools to set aside a minute of silence before each day gets underway. Garden State law-maker have for years tried to pass off such a measure as a non-sectarian incentive for adolescent introspection a perfect opportunity for the tykes to contemplate their relative positions in the cosmos. fortunately, former Governor Brendan Byrne saw through this poorly disguised drive for state sponsored prayer and killed two bills identical to the current legislation. Governor Robert Kean a conservative Republican, has not yet indicated his position on the issue.

Proponents of prayer in schools nationwide have waged a 20 year crusade to undermine a string of clear Supreme Court decisions upholding the Constitution's ban on governmental establishment of religion." Within the past 12 months alone, the Court threw out a Louisiana law allowing students or teachers to offer self-styled spiritual messages in the classroom and refused to hear an appeal of a decision forbidding students from holding in school prayer meetings on their time. The New Jersy back door version of a prayer law deserves a quick death before it ever makes it into the courts.

"But the Kiddies don't have to pray!" protest the bill's sponsors. The silent moment is "to be used solely at the discretion of the individual student," assures the legislation in a clever but unsatisfactory nod to the First Amendment.

First graders and high school seniors alike may pause at any point during the day for reflection, spiritual or otherwise. Obligatory group meditation serves no other purpose than to encourage teachers and officials to subvert the Constitution by endorosing particular religious rituals under state auspicious. Students are after all, a captive audience, forced by compulsory attendence laws to take part in school-sponsored ceremonies. A Federal judge from Tennessee emphasized these same arguments three weeks ago, when he overruled a law in his state that closely resemblem the latest New Jersey proposal.

Stubborn to the point of being inane backers of the Garden State bill have produced a new justification for their scheme a minute of silence may quell the disorder that has recently plagued many classrooms. In other words. 60 seconds of practice each day will train youngsters to remain ungetie straight through gometry period and the 3:00 pm belt. If true, why not ban all noise until lunch time. Or forbid the pint-sized calteria muggers and pre-pubsecent drug pushers from even speaking while on school property. This ought to whip the little troublemakers into shape. Meanwhile religious devotion becomes trivialized when portrayed as a principal's tool for maintaining discipline.

REVEALING THE New Jersey measure for what it really is would not seriously damage the broad coalition of fundamentalists and political reactionaries determined to force their narrow conception of morality on other Americans. Rallying behind President Reagan's hypocritical call for religious freedom," these forces continue to press for Congressional approval of a Constitutional amendment allowing states to turn the classroom into a chapel.

Even more discouraging are the public opinion polls which conclude that more than half of the people in this country now favor some form of school-sponsored prayer-regardless of the vivid dungaree of prejudice and persecution created when the majority is empowered to dictate religious practice For everyone.

Yet the response to this situation should not be to surrender provincial skirmishes under the assumption that defeat nationally is inevitable. Instead legislators and executives who recognize the wisdom of separating church from state must block all attacks on the principle, including those that are deceptively packaged. Small victories in places like New Jersey will preserve the opportunity to continue the larger campaign against the Reagan amendment and against the widely held perception that public school prayer is possible without violating the ideal of a government that refrains from legislating religion.