U.S. Seeks to Ease Ban on School Prayer : High court: Attorneys for Administration urge justices to permit ‘the acknowledgement of God’ at graduation ceremonies but not in classrooms.

Bush Administration attorneys urged the Supreme Court Wednesday to partly relax its three-decade ban on prayer in public schools and to permit “the acknowledgement of God” during graduation ceremonies.

The invocation of God during ceremonies is “as old and as enduring as the republic itself,” Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr told the justices. Organized prayers in classrooms should remain unconstitutional, but the high court should allow a cleric to pray at school ceremonies, he said.

“We believe ourselves to be one nation under God,” said Starr, the government’s top trial lawyer.

The arguments, in a Providence, R.I., school prayer case (Lee vs. Weisman, 90-1014), come at a time when a more conservative Supreme Court is believed ready to abandon the strict “separation of church and state” doctrine.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has long argued for permitting a greater role for religion in public life, including the public schools.

Two years ago, three other conservatives--Justices Byron R. White, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy--said that they favored a “substantial revision” of the court’s church-state rulings. With the addition of two new Bush appointees, Justices David H. Souter and Clarence Thomas, the chief justice may have a majority ready to rewrite the law on religion.

But, on Wednesday, both Starr and the Rhode Island school district’s attorney, Charles J. Cooper, a former Rehnquist law clerk, were subjected to surprisingly sharp questions by the justices. Their comments during the hourlong arguments suggested that the justices are still wrestling among themselves over devising a new formula to determine when the government crosses the line that violates the First Amendment’s ban on “laws respecting an establishment of religion.”

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has contended that government actions that appear to “endorse” religion are unconstitutional. For example, the display of a creche in a county courthouse suggests that government endorses and favors the Christian religion, she said, and thereby violates the First Amendment.

But Justice Kennedy has proposed that public displays of religion are acceptable so long as there is no “coercion” that forces nonbelievers to give money or take part in a religious exercise. The Bush Administration adopted Kennedy’s view and urged the full court to accept it as the law.

But even Kennedy seemed troubled Wednesday by graduation prayers delivered by a minister or rabbi.

“A graduation is a key event in a young person’s life,” he said. Students and their families who are offended by religious invocations will either have to sit through the prayer or skip the graduation, he said.

“You may hear things you don’t like and you don’t agree with,” Starr conceded. “That’s part of a free society.”

The case began in 1986, when Daniel Weisman, who is Jewish, objected when he and his daughter were asked to rise for a moment of prayer to Jesus Christ during a school ceremony in Providence. Three years later, during his younger daughter’s graduation from a middle school, officials invited a rabbi to deliver an invocation. “God of the free, hope of the brave,” he began. He ended with the word amen.

Weisman then filed suit against Robert Lee, the school’s principal, contending that the graduation prayers violated the First Amendment.

Under the Supreme Court’s prevailing rulings, a government action whose purpose or “primary effect” is to promote religion violates the First Amendment. Based on this view, a federal judge in Providence and the U.S. appeals court in Boston banned the Providence graduation prayers.

In May, the California Supreme Court relied on the same precedents to forbid prayers at high school graduation ceremonies.