The legal spat over mealtime prayer at military colleges has swept into Congress, where a group of conservative Republicans is rallying support for a bill to safeguard the right of U.S. military academies to offer grace at their mess halls.
The effort is the first legislative response to federal court rulings striking down suppertime prayer at the Virginia Military Institute as a violation of church-state separation, and to stern warnings from a civil-liberties group that the Naval Academy's lunchtime grace is on shaky constitutional ground.
Annapolis is the only federal academy where a chaplain leads grace before a meal that all 4,200 students must attend. West Point does not offer a mealtime prayer, and the Air Force Academy pauses at lunch for a moment of silence.
"Right now my concern is Annapolis," says Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., a North Carolina Republican and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee who introduced the bill last month. "I have spoken to many graduates of the academies, and they have told me how important their faith and religion is to them."
He cast the bill as part of a broader fight for religion in civic life that included the failed campaign this summer to block the removal of a 2-ton monument of the Ten Commandments from an Alabama courthouse.
"There is an assault across the nation by the extreme left that would like to undermine traditional religion in America," said Jones, a graduate of Atlantic Christian College.
The Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sent letters to the Naval Academy questioning the legality of its lunchtime grace and has invited midshipmen to take the step, however improbable, of suing the school. Though midshipmen can stand silently as a chaplain leads the nondenominational prayer, those who miss any part of lunch can be disciplined.
David R. Rocah, the staff attorney for the Maryland ACLU, said the group fully supports the voluntary exercise of religion, but objects to the academy's grace because students have no choice about whether to attend.
Rocah denounced the Jones bill as "drivel."
"Congress can't authorize the military academies to violate the Constitution," he said. "This is a meaningless exercise in political grandstanding by people cynically attempting to exploit religion for their own political purposes. It's despicable."
