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Wednesday, May 4, 2011

National Day of Prayer

(States Twitter)-National Day of Prayer is an annual day of observance held on the first Thursday of May, designated by the United States Congress, when people are asked "to turn to God in prayer and meditation". The law formalizing its annual observance was enacted in 1952, and its constitutionality is being challenged in court.


Controversy
Issues of government involvement with religion are often disputed because of the Establishment clause in the First Amendment. While the free-exercise clause allows for this type of event to be organized by non-governmental bodies, the U.S. Congress may not pass any laws enforcing religious observances.
The contention was brought to attention by one of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson. On January 23, 1808 he wrote on the topic:
“ "Fasting and prayer are religious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the time for these exercises, and the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and right can never be safer than in their hands, where the Constitution has deposited it. ...civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents. ”
In 1822, James Madison wrote:
“ "There has been another deviation from the strict principle in the Executive Proclamations of fasts & festivals, so far, at least, as they have spoken the language of injunction, or have lost sight of the equality of all religious sects in the eye of the Constitution. Whilst I was honored with the Executive Trust I found it necessary on more than one occasion to follow the example of predecessors. But I was always careful to make the Proclamations absolutely indiscriminate, and merely recommendatory; or rather mere designations of a day, on which all who thought proper might unite in consecrating it to religious purposes, according to their own faith & forms. In this sense, I presume you reserve to the Govt. a right to appoint particular days for religious worship throughout the State, without any penal sanction enforcing the worship.


Litigation
On October 3, 2008, the Freedom From Religion Foundation sued President George W. Bush, Jim Doyle, Shirley Dobson, chair, National Day of Prayer Task Force, and White House Press Secretary Dana Perino at a Madison, Wisconsin federal court, challenging the federal law designating the National Day of Prayer. Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) is defending Shirley Dobson and the National Day of Prayer Task Force. The Obama administration asked U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb to dismiss the case in March 2009. The administration argued the group has no legal standing to sue and that the tradition of the National Day of Prayer dated back to 1775. The suit was then amended to include President Obama and Press Secretary Gibbs.
U.S. Department of Justice filed a notice to appeal the ruling on April 22, 2010, and on April 14, 2011 a panel at the 7th District Court of Appeals unanimously overruled Crabb's decision, stating that "a feeling of alienation cannot suffice as injury." They further stated that the President is free to make appeals to the public based on many kinds of grounds, including political and religious, and that such requests do not obligate citizens to comply and do not encroach on citizens' rights. The same day, the Freedom From Religion Foundation announced that it would seek an en banc review of the ruling by the full Seventh Circuit court.
History


There had been at least two individual (i.e. single-day) national days of prayer in U.S. history before the day was made an official annual day of observance in 1952. Prior to the nation's founding, the Continental Congress issued a proclamation recommending "a day of publick sic humiliation, fasting, and prayer" be observed on July 20, 1775. During the Quasi-War with France, President John Adams declared May 9, 1798 as "a day of solemn humility, fasting, and prayer," during which citizens of all faiths were asked to pray "that our country may be protected from all the dangers which threaten it. On March 30, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation expressing the idea "that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins", and designated the day of April 30, 1863 as a day of "national humiliation, fasting and prayer" in the hope that God would respond by restoring "our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace". He went on to say, "...it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
More recently, the idea of an annual National Day of Prayer was introduced by the Rev. Billy Graham, who suggested it in the midst of a several-weeks crusade in the nation’s capitol. Members of the House and Senate introduced a joint resolution for an annual National Day of Prayer, "on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.


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