by BILLY BALL
SANFORD — When Lee County Commissioner Richard Hayes takes on the board's rotating prayer duties in April's Board of Commissioners meetings, he's going to do something a little different.
On a board where some members have been known to openly offer up Christian prayers, Hayes says he will call for a moment of silence instead, sending out the call to all that they can pray silently as they see fit.
"I'm very comfortable in my own element to say that you can pray to whoever," Hayes said.
It's new for Lee commissioners, but not new in Lee County. Sanford City Council members amended their meeting invocations months ago to a moment of silence and members of the Lee Board of Education have long been doing the same.
It's a movement spurred by personal preference in some cases, but in most cases, it's a movement sown by changing winds in North Carolina and a landmark court case some 80 miles to the northwest in Forsyth County.
When the U.S. Supreme Court in January eschewed consideration of a challenge to lower courts' decisions on prayer in Forsyth meetings, it was perhaps the final legal defeat for a county battle that had spread over five years and reportedly burned up more than $200,000 in government money.
Challenged by first private citizens and then the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over frequent Christian prayers delivered in county meetings by area ministers, Forsyth leaders lost court battles before a magistrate judge, the U.S. District Court and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals before the Supreme Court nixed an appeal at the highest level.
The message from courts? Generic prayer to a non-specific creator passes muster, but prayer to Jesus Christ, Muhammad or any other deity associated with one religion is not acceptable in a government meeting.
The response from North Carolina has been mixed. In some counties, leaders openly thumb their nose at the ruling. In others, officials have scuttled denominational invocations.
The response in Lee County is no less divided, with reluctant City Council members embracing silent prayer in recent months even as some county commissioners offered up scathing condemnations of recommendations to move away from Christian invocations.
In one blistering and now-infamous private email exchange between local conservatives and Lee Commissioner Jim Womack last October, the openly Christian leader blasted board attorney Dale Talbert for his recommendation that members like Womack and fellow Commissioner Charlie Parks dispense with the denominational prayer.
In the email, Womack chides Talbert as a "liberal incompetent attorney-in-waiting ... who continues to pursue activist concerns (like trying to get Charlie and me to stop praying to Jesus in our invocations) rather than doing his homework with the [UNC School of Government] in getting our incentives policy tightened up."
Womack has since apologized for the email and argued the missive was never meant for public consumption when a copy was mistakenly forwarded to another commissioner's government account, but the divide has borne itself out in meetings this year as Womack pressed forward with Christian prayers during his turn to deliver the invocation.
Lee commissioners have not received any complaints about the prayers, officials say, even though gripes left with the city council have already amended their procedure, but it remains to be seen if the invocations would remain should a challenge arise.
"That's not to say that won't come," Womack said Tuesday. "No way would I predict that won't happen, because you can always find someone in a population of 60,000 citizens that does not like what we do."
'THESE MEETINGS ARE FOR EVERYBODY'
When the ACLU took on the Forsyth County case in 2007, a pair of locals had one simple message: Stop the sectarian prayer. When courts began to side with those two dissenters, the ripples spread across North Carolina.
Today, the ACLU has contacted roughly 25 governments in the state after receiving grievances from private citizens on government prayer. More than 15 of those governments have voluntarily made changes, says ACLU spokesman Mike Meno. Others, like commissioners in Rowan County to the west, have stiffly rejected a new policy.
According to Meno, though, the direction from courts to jettison denominational prayer is clear.
"It's a public meeting," Meno said. "That's supposed to be welcoming and open to all citizens. The law says you can't hold a prayer that would alienate some and make them feel unwelcome, and any sectarian prayer does that."
Meno points out his organization, which spearheaded the legal fight in Forsyth, is only taking up the issue with governments in cases where the ACLU receives a specific complaint from a local resident.
No such complaints have been received from Lee County, but Meno said his office is open to hear from residents.
"There's 100 counties, we don't know what's going on everywhere," he said. "So if sectarian prayers are occurring, we're really asking local citizens to let us know, and if they feel alienated or made unwelcome by these prayers to get in touch with our office."
Meno hears the protests from North Carolina counties, the refusals to submit and the arguments that Forsyth's practice of inviting ministers to deliver the invocations makes the court ruling not germane to the standard in many counties like Lee, where the county leaders themselves provide the prayers.
But, according to Meno, that distinction does not matter. Courts, he said, are rejecting "government speech" as a place for sectarian messages, and prayers from county commissioners would certainly constitute government speech.
"Elected officials more than anyone should understand these meetings are for everybody," he said. "And they need to be as inclusive as possible."
'YOU CAN MAKE A POINT RIGHT TO THE COURTHOUSE'
In Lee County, the rebuttal has been swift, and in some cases shifting.
The decision by the Sanford City Council to opt for a moment of silence has not been welcomed by all, including Mayor Cornelia Olive, who at one point suggested offended members of the public step outside council chambers during the prayer.
"I'm really proud that Sanford is a faith-based community," Olive said. "I think it's repugnant that when you have a community whose population far outweighs believers in other deities or non-believers, I just think we should be able to have that right and privilege since we are such a majority."
Olive acknowledged she has delivered Christian prayers at council meetings, and their assembly has seen similar invocations from council members like James Williams, Charles Taylor and Sam Gaskins, even though one council member — L.I. "Poly" Cohen — is Jewish.
Cohen said Tuesday that he believed city leaders should uphold the longtime prayers, seeing it as a question of religious freedom.
"It's a tricky question," Cohen said. "Because everybody wants to have a say so on what we're doing, and I don't think the court should tell us we can't pray."
Still, Olive said the dilemma comes down to money, and whether the city wants to face a costly legal battle they're not likely to win, citing the more than $200,000 bill foisted on Forsyth taxpayers.
"That is extremely costly for us to look at," Olive said. "There were people who said, 'Let's continue to do what they're doing because (the ACLU) can't sue everybody.' That is one philosophy, but you don't want to be the test case to continue it."
In Broadway, a small town with a proportionately small budget, the expense is a clear deterrent.
As Broadway Town Manager Bob Stevens pointed out Tuesday, town leaders have taken a cautious approach to the conflict by typically delivering generic prayers that avoid sectarian pronouncements.
"We try not to be in your face," Stevens said, adding town commissioners get their point across during invocations without making specific references to Christianity or any other religion.
"If there are Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus and if they take offense, I see where this is all coming from," Stevens said. "You can make a point right to the courthouse, but we try to pray to a higher power."
But in Lee County government, there is no unified, clear direction on the subject.
At one point this month, Commissioner Parks — an outspoken Christian — suggested leaders should cool the evangelical statements, but days later Parks reversed course and suggested he had been misled about the law by the governance experts at the UNC School of Government.
Parks said he believes Lee County practice would not raise alarms based on the standard established in the Forsyth case.
"My position is I don't want to do anything illegal that would cause detriment to the county," Parks said. "And from the information that I have at the moment, praying in Jesus' name would do that, but after reading this law case, I don't see that we're restricted from doing that. It may take a lot more of a legal mind than mine to do that."
Womack aligned himself with Parks, declaring the prayer as a "rich tradition" in Lee County meetings that he believes meets the law's requirements, although he acknowledged the county would have to make a decision if a challenge comes to the forefront.
Asked if he would be willing to fight a court case to settle the question, Womack was uncertain.
"I'm not sure," he said. "My first reaction is to defend the constitutional freedoms that we have and the practices that have stood the test of time. If the challenge has merit on its face, and if it's a strong challenge and there are lots of legal opinions otherwise, then maybe we'll compromise, but I don't anticipate that happening."
Womack added that should leaders adopt silent prayers, the issue becomes a "slippery slope."
"The next time they say we take umbrage with you having a moment of silence because you're suggesting we need to pray, or we're offended with the church you're going to and we want to shut the church doors," he said. "... Where do you draw the line? At some point, you continue down that slippery slope until you abandon religion altogether."
Likewise, board Chairman Linda Shook said leaders should be able to retain the Christian prayers, but agreed commissioners would have to "wait and see" if a legal challenge comes.
"I'm disturbed by it all," Shook said. "It's a dangerous route for us to go. I think individual commissioners ought to be able to pray the way they want to."
Not all commissioners agree. Commissioner Robert Reives allows county attorneys to present generic invocations in his stead, and with Hayes' decision to make the first move next month for a moment of silence, Hayes promised an inevitable backlash.
"I would be a person who would observe the law, and I believe that law as it is being defended by these justices or upheld is the correct approach," Hayes said. "I believe that balance and equal opportunity is very important."
