Senate panel kills bill on prayers at state police events

Figures. We’re never allowed to publicly call on God in this country unless we’re in deep shit….

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Del. Bill Carrico’s bid to put an end to the Virginia State Police’s regulation of its chaplains’ prayers was shot down in a Senate committee Monday.

The Senate Courts of Justice Committee voted 8-7 to kill House Bill 2314, which would have prohibited state officials from instructing state police volunteer chaplains to avoid referring to religion — including the name of Jesus Christ — during prayers at department-sanctioned events.

Senators voting against the measure were wary of violating the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment against laws “respecting an establishment of religion,” but Carrico, R-Grayson County, said that by killing his bill they were still promoting a religion — “the ‘no-God’ religion.”

“I’ll be back,” Carrico said after the vote. “I’m not quitting. I’ve never quit on any issue. … This is bigger than me. The Christian faith has been persecuted in this country for too long, and I think [people] are getting tired of it.”

A reaction statement from the Family Foundation, a socially conservative advocacy group, was more strongly worded: “The birthplace of religious freedom is now the home of censorship and bigotry.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, which had threatened to sue if the bill passed, used similar language in a statement that implied the death of the bill was a blow for “our most fundamental notions of religious freedom and equality.”

Carrico — a retired state trooper — had introduced the legislation in response to a controversy that erupted last year when state police Superintendent Steve Flaherty issued a directive instructing the department’s chaplains not to pray in the name of Jesus at department-sanctioned events such as the agency’s academy graduation ceremony and its annual memorial service.

Six troopers subsequently resigned from the chaplaincy program because of the directive, which was issued in response to a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in a case involving prayer at Fredericksburg City Council meetings.

Carrico’s bill — which would have scrapped that policy — passed the House on a 66-30 vote but ran into trouble in the Senate committee, which had already killed a similar but broader bill earlier this month. That measure — Senate Bill 1072 — would have prohibited not just state police, but also any other government entity, from regulating the content of prayers at public meetings or events.

That bill, killed on a 9-6 vote, would have affected local deliberative bodies such as the Roanoke City Council, where controversy erupted in December, when Vice Mayor Sherman Lea, who is also a preacher, asked that his name be removed from a list of ministers used to offer invocations at council meetings. Lea’s request came after he received a complaint about an oblique reference to Jesus during the opening invocation of a council meeting.

Carrico’s bill was more narrowly drawn, but despite the reassurance from an attorney general’s representative that the bill could be successfully defended in court, it stirred many of the same concerns about violating the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause.

Michael Shochet, chaplain for the Fairfax County Police Department and the Washington field office of the FBI who also serves as a cantor at Temple Rodef Shalom, said the bill went too far in allowing clergy to “push” their religion.

“When I don my police uniform, I am no longer representing my congregation as a Jewish clergy,” Shochet told the committee. “Instead, I am representing the government, and therefore the public is my congregation. The prayer is not about me: It is about helping all those needing to get through a time of distress.”

After hearing testimony from Shochet and others, Sen. Thomas Norment, R-Williamsburg, successfully proposed amendments that would have inserted the phrase “nonsectarian” through Carrico’s bill, which would have essentially enshrined Flaherty’s policy into state code. Carrico said he’d strike the bill if it passed as amended.

Instead, however, Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, moved the bill be killed, with the ensuing vote falling on party lines.

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