The ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the prayers in May 2001 on behalf of Neil Mellen who has been serving in the Peace Corps in Micronesia
ACLU asks court not to hear case
Review of VMI prayer ruling is unnecessary, it says; Kilgore differs
BY ZINIE CHEN SAMPSON
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jan 17, 2004
The ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the prayers in May 2001 on behalf of Neil Mellen and Paul Knick, two VMI cadets who complained they were pressured into participating in religious activity. They graduated in 2002.
Mellen has been serving in the Peace Corps in Micronesia and Knick is in the Air Force, Virginia ACLU legal director Rebecca Glenberg said.
The American Civil Liberties Union says it is unnecessary for the U.S. Supreme Court to review a ruling that declared the dinner prayers at Virginia Military Institute unconstitutional.
In court papers filed this week, ACLU lawyers argued "the lower courts in Virginia merely followed Supreme Court precedents in concluding that the official mealtime prayers at VMI are unconstitutional," state ACLU executive director Kent Willis said. "There should be no need for them to review the case."
Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore had asked the high court to review the case after the full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August refused to review a three-judge panel's ruling that mealtime prayers at the state-funded military college violate the constitutional separation of church and state.
Kilgore has argued that the blessings are like those recited at the U.S. Naval Academy and in the military, and that no one was required to engage in prayer.
"We stand by our brief and we feel that the corps of cadets has a right to participate in voluntary prayer at mealtime," Kilgore spokesman Tim Murtaugh said Thursday. "It's part of the fabric of the VMI educational experience."
The Supreme Court can reject the request for review, leaving the prayer ban intact, or it can agree to hear the case and issue its own decision.
VMI stopped the prayers after U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon ruled them unconstitutional in January 2002.
First-year students were required to attend the pre-dinner prayer gathering, the ACLU said, while upperclass students were not. Though the prayers were voluntary, the appeals panel found that the Lexington school's emphasis on conformity pressured cadets to participate in a religious exercise.
Evening prayers had been a tradition at VMI since at least the 1950s, except for about five years in the early 1990s, when cadets didn't all eat dinner together. Before the meal was served, a member of the cadet corps read a nondenominational prayer that began with either "Almighty God," "O God," "Father God," "Heavenly Father," or "Sovereign God."
The ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the prayers in May 2001 on behalf of Neil Mellen and Paul Knick, two VMI cadets who complained they were pressured into participating in religious activity. They graduated in 2002.
Mellen has been serving in the Peace Corps in Micronesia and Knick is in the Air Force, Virginia ACLU legal director Rebecca Glenberg said.
