I reading my Twitter feed a few days ago and saw some tweets from Jen McCreight of BlagHag who was frothing at the mouth with anger. Why pray tell? (No pun intended. Seriously.) A student at a Louisiana high school had protested against a school-sponsored prayer being offered at graduation and was receiving death threats. (Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist has a timeline of the events.) His parents have disowned him and he has moved to be with his brother in Texas.

Oh boy…

As I’m all about providing fair and balanced commentary on this blog, let’s look at both sides of the coin.

HEADS!
As irritating as it might be for Damon Fowler to have to sit through a prayer to a deity in which he doesn’t believe, his classmates’ wishes for their graduation ceremony got ignored because one person felt their rights were violated. It sounds like those students who planned the graduation and chose the speakers *WANTED* this prayer to be part of it and the majority of their classmates agreed. It’s unfair that the desires of many got ignored to appease one person and I understand people being upset over it.

TAILS!
This is a *PUBLIC* school and having a prayer at graduation is a violation of Lousiana state law and a violation of the First Amendment. Yes, this is the Bible Belt and yes, the vast majority of people are Christian but it’s a public ceremony and Damon should not have had to participate in something that violated his right to freedom of religion.

My Take
Neither side is in the right here. Damon should not have reacted as he did but… he also didn’t deserve to receive death threats, his family disowning him, one of the teachers from the school making some really nasty comments about him and how he “hasn’t contributed anything to graduation or to [his] classmates”, or any of the bad things that have happened to him. It is really tragic that these things had to happen.

Update and a Compromise
Hemant put up a ChipIn widget on his blog to create a scholarship for Damon and as I’m blogging this, people have donated $6,657 toward Damon’s education. Duuuuuude… The Freedom From Religion Foundation has also given him a $1000 scholarship. In other words, people are making sure he’s being taken care of during all of this. His sister and older brother have gotten (or are getting him) to Texas to live with his older brother.

OK… so here’s the compromise that could theoretically have happened if all parties had reacted rationally and not emotionally: the prayer could have been replaced with an invocation that was some other creative form like a poem, a song, or even a reading from a famous speech. For example, the San Jose City Council has an invocation before every meeting and I’ve never seen it actually be a prayer given by a clergy person. Then again, this is northern California and hardly a stop on the Bible Belt so people would probably not tolerate a prayer being given. (I live in a rural community here so it could theoretically happen.) Another alternative would be to have a baccalaureate service separate from the graduation where the student giving the prayer was invited to participate in the service.

As I said before, it is tragic that things had to turn out this way.