CONWAY — A Wisconsin-based foundation has asked that the Conway City Council quit having a prayer offered at its meetings.
“Several local residents and taxpayers who strenuously oppose prayer before government meetings” contacted the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the organization’s attorney, Rebecca S. Markert, said in a recent letter to Mayor Tab Townsell.
Townsell said Friday that he forwarded the letter, dated July 13, to the city’s aldermen after receiving it July 18.
Townsell, first elected mayor in 1998, said the City Council began the prayers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In the past, leaders of the prayer have varied, but now a local Methodist minister often offers it.
“One thing that we take pains to do is to always invite people to join us [in prayer] if they want,” Townsell said. “We do that prior to the start of the City Council meeting. We don’t do it after we call the meeting to order.
“We want to do what is legally correct for the city,” the mayor added.
In an e-mail later Friday, Townsell said he hopes the city can continue with the prayers. “But, to be honest, I wouldn’t ever want anyone to be uncomfortable and/or concerned about equity and justice when before our city council because of professing a different belief system. We are the elected government for all Conway, not just those who pray like we do.”
Townsell said the city attorney hopes to talk with a North Little Rock official to find out how that city handled a similar complaint in 2010.
That year, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas warned of a possible legal challenge unless North Little Rock halted what the ACLU considered sectarian prayers at City Council meetings. The ACLU said the prayers endorsed Christianity over other beliefs.
That situation was defused after council agendas and meeting telecasts began including a disclaimer that any religious viewpoints expressed were the speaker’s personal opinions. The notice also said any prayers were “not intended to proselytize, advance or disparage any religious belief.”
The ACLU said in a letter at the time that the city also intended to start using “a system of rotational prayer that will include without limitation other faiths and nonsectarian prayer.”
In the foundation’s letter to Townsell, Markert wrote, “Government prayer is unnecessary, inappropriate, and divisive. Calling upon Council members and citizens in attendance to pray (even silently) is coercive, embarrassing, and beyond the scope of secular city government. Council members are free to pray privately or to worship on their own time in their own way. They do not need to worship on taxpayers’ time.”
Markert said it was the foundation’s understanding that the City Council “includes prayers as part of its meetings, presumably offering the opening prayer prior to the start of recording the meeting for public access.”
“On behalf of our Conway membership, we ask that you discontinue the practice of conducting prayers during Council meetings,” she added.
“We fail to see why divine guidance is needed over such earthly matters anyway,” she wrote.
The foundation, based in Madison, Wis., describes itself as a national nonprofit organization representing more than 16,000 members whose goal “is to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church.”
In addition to Conway, the foundation has sent letters of complaint to the cities of Bentonville and Searcy earlier this year over what it called “sectarian prayers that opened [city] council meetings.”
Townsell shared a copy of a 2008 letter from an Arkansas Municipal League attorney to a Cherokee Village official about the legality of an opening prayer at city council meetings. In that letter, the attorney wrote that case law was still developing.
But the attorney also noted that in 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld what he called “ ‘legislative prayers’ in the [Judeo-Christian] tradition that referred to God, but did not refer specifically to elements of the speaker’s religion.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 07/25/2011