Video Reaction: Prayers at Saddleback College Cut at Two Ceremonies

Prayers and invocations will now be limited to graduation ceremonies at Saddleback College, according to a recent settlement the South Orange County Community College District has struck with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The Washington, D.C.-based educational nonprofit dedicated to preserving church-state separation sued the community college district in November 2009 on behalf of several faculty members and students who objected to prayers at various functions at   and Irvine Valley colleges.

The trial set to begin Thursday, April 14 was cancelled by the settlement.

For student reactions, click the video on the upper right.

According to the settlement, no invocation will be offered at either the scholarship ceremonies or the chancellor’s so-called “opening sessions” which kick off the fall and winter/spring semesters.

Commencement, however, will continue to feature a nonsectarian prayer or moment of silence.

“We got what we wanted on two of three (ceremonies),” said Christopher P. Murphy of law firm Mayer Brown’s Los Angeles office. “I think it was a good settlement. We didn’t get everything we wanted, but that’s how settlements work.”

According to the settlement, the community college district will pay Americans United $250,000 in legal fees.

The settlement follows a ruling a federal judge issued in February that in general, the school’s prayers and invocations did not violate students’, faculty’s, or staff members’ First Amendment rights to be free from a government-established religion.

Judge R. Gary Klausner did find that in two instances at Saddleback College, college officials did cross the line. However, because of their “one-time nature,” along with policy changes the Board of Trustees has since made, there is no legal remedy warranted.

The controversy against the prayers built momentum starting in fall 2006, when the Saddleback Academic Senate passed a resolution in opposition to the prayers. Irvine Valley’s academic senate and Saddleback’s student government organization passed resolutions in support of Saddleback’s faculty.

The prayers, however, continued. At the May 2007 graduation ceremony and the following commencements, faculty members silently held up a banner reading “Respect Everyone’s Beliefs” as a form of “non-disruptive protest,” according to the original complaint filed in the case. Prayers were added to the chancellor’s opening sessions starting in May 2007.

Klausner found remarks made by Trustee Donald Wagner during the May 2008 commencement violated the First Amendment when he described those who would oppose the prayer as “those too uncertain to abide any mention in public of the divine.” Wagner invited the audience to stand, but added, “But no one made you.”

Also, now-retired district Chancellor Raghu Mathur violated the First Amendment when in a 2009 opening session he included a patriotic slide show of flags and soldiers which ended with the statement, “Only two defining sources have ever offered to die for you. Jesus Christ and the American GI. One died for your soul, the other died for your freedom.” Mathur had said he was unaware of the last slide’s content, but Klausner said that was legally irrelevant.

Among those suing were several professors at Saddleback College. Prayers said at the 2004 and 2005 scholarship ceremonies offended math professor Karla Westphal so much, she stopped attending them altogether, despite personally funding two scholarships in 2009.

In the original complaint, economics professor Alannah Rosenberg also took offense to the prayers heard at various ceremonies. “She believes that intercessory prayer and requests for blessings should be made only in private, and only on very special religious occasions,” her lawyers wrote.

“She therefore believes that the district’s official prayers – which often ask God to care for and bless students, faculty and administrators – are inappropriate for college functions, inconsistent with her religion and offensive to God,” the complaint states.

Former Saddleback student Ashley Mockett, now a student at the University of California, Berkeley, joined the suit after attending prayers at several scholarship ceremonies. Had she refused to participate, she could have jeopardized her scholarships. She therefore, the lawsuit states, was a captive audience.

So incensed by the public prayer, she went on to found the Saddleback Freethinkers Club. She noted in the lawsuit that the prayers prompted unwanted conversations with her then-6-year-old son, who was “far too young to have to deal with such difficult, adult concepts.”

Murphy, whose firm took the case for free, said nothing in the settlement restricts the rights of faculty and students to hold up their placards in protest of future invocations.

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