ACLU Files Lawsuit After NC Gov’t Officials Refuse To Stop Praying At Meetings

Despite a lower court ruling that found prayers at local government meetings in Forsyth County (another community in North Carolina) unconstitutional and the Supreme Court’s subsequent refusal to hear the case, officials in Rowan County aren’t backing down. They, too, have been beginning meetings with invocations — a practice they don’t plan on giving up. As a result, county commissioners become the ACLU’s most recent target of legal action over sectarian prayer at government meetings.

It was last year that the Rowan County Board of Commissioners first defied pressure from the ACLU to cease Christian prayers; the organization called these invocations unconstitutional and has continued to maintain this stance.

At the time, one of the board members (and the county commissioner), Chad Mitchell, defended the prayers said at the opening of each meeting. Apparently, board members are given the chance, via rotation, to give a prayer if they so choose. In the past, some have opted not to be included in the rotation (a choice that the group deems perfectly acceptable).

“The practice of opening with an invocation has been ongoing for many years,” Mitchell explained at the time. ”The earliest book of minutes that we have easy access to is from February of 1971, and the Board of Commissioners at that time was using the same procedure of invocation as we are currently using.”

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