Playing Fair, and Giving All Gods Equal Time

The Big Guy got a big workout last week, didn’t he?

Not Shaquille O’Neal. Anyway, I hear O’Neal now wishes to be known as the Big Shakespeare, for having recited lines from “Twelfth Night” to fans who would have cheered if he had recited the Miranda warning.

I mean THE Big Guy. His name, or hers, was invoked with gratitude throughout this NBA championship series--”Thank God we’ve got home court” . . . “I had to pull the shot back a little, and thank God it fell.”

Athletes have been seen and heard thanking God in end zones and bullpens and locker rooms for some time now. The Supreme Being has been hailed for winning touchdowns, for 16 NFL victories (“. . . maybe he cared enough to allow the other team to win the other two times,” the quarterback mused). Laker Coach Phil Jackson, the son of fundamentalist Christian preachers, has professed a belief in prayer, the laying on of hands, yoga and Zen meditation.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar praised Allah after the Lakers won another NBA title on his watch. A Green Bay Packers player credited God with summoning him from retirement for one last game. It is much more personal and even proselytizing a show of faith than the one by Sandy Koufax, who in 1959 refused to pitch a World Series game because it fell on Yom Kippur.

As peculiar as it is to hear of wartime generals on both sides of the battle line imploring the same God to help them slaughter the other guy, at least that deals with life and death. It seems so frivolous, almost sacrilegious, to think of enlisting heavenly help for a game. Does Jesus walk the sidelines in spirit, wearing a headset and a worried look? Can the deity of galaxies unimaginable really sweat over a postseason game? Does he truly spend Sunday afternoons sitting wherever it is the Almighty sits, watching the big game with a huge Packer foam cheesehead on his noggin?

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The Lakers’ victory coincided with another victory--this one in the Supreme Court, for opponents of student-led prayers at public school events. At a Texas high school, the daughter of a local minister prayed “in the name of Jesus” before each home football game; as long as it wasn’t school officials who were praying, the argument went, it wasn’t really school-approved. But the Supreme Court, not buying the subterfuge, reiterated 6 to 3 that private prayer before, during or after school is fine, but sanctioned praying at a school event crosses the line.

The matter has been roiling since 1948, occasionally reaching a boiling point in the decades since then. When I graduated from high school, I was asked to deliver the closing prayer at an off-campus official graduation event. Boy, did I.

What I recited was a Zen Buddhist text; a wonderful teacher had given it to us in a humanities class. It had to do with enlightenment and acceptance, and the last line went like this: “The mind is brighter than sun and moon together, cleaner than frost and snow.”

Well, the brimstone hit the fan. Some people complained, including the man of God who had gone on about Christianity in remarks that preceded mine. It wasn’t a prayer of their faith or their Lord, they said. They felt left out, maybe even insulted.

My point exactly. And the Supreme Court’s: A public prayer in an official place excludes those who pray differently, or to a different manifestation of God, or who don’t pray at all. Like turning the divine into the No. 1 draft choice for the NBA or the NFL, it makes God a cheerleader for the “right side.” What are Jewish or Muslim students to think? What is the opposing team to think? What, for that matter, is God to think?

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Louisiana is home to that pro football team with the beatific name and the fans who once wore paper bags on their heads to conceal their embarrassment that, if God had not abandoned their team, everyone else had.

Louisiana is also home to a state school board that wants to warn its students that the teaching of evolution should not influence them to reject “the biblical version of creation.” The Supreme Court last week rejected this, as it had turned down Louisiana in 1987, when the state wanted to give equal time to teaching evolution and the oxymoronic “creation science.”

The Supreme Court could have gone the other way. Challenged the equal-time subterfuge. Called the bluff. Fine, teach Genesis. But you must also teach every religion’s creation epic. Start with, oh, the Babylonians’ “Gilgamesh,” about a man who, warned by a god, builds a boat to save his family and animals from a flood that inundates the world.

Somebody say “amen.”

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Columnist Patt Morrison writes today for the vacationing Al Martinez. Her e-mail address: patt.morrison@latimes.com.