When it comes to prayer at public school graduation ceremonies, applicable constitutional law is very clear: school-sponsored prayers are simply not allowed. The issue was decided unambiguously by the United States Supreme Court in the 1992 case of Lee vs. Weisman, a decision wherein Justice Kennedy pointed out that school-sponsored prayers can be construed by some "to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy."

This of course is a basic question of church-state separation, but it also relates to freedom of and equal rights for religious minorities. A graduation ceremony is a landmark event in life, Justice Kennedy said, and religious dissenters should not have to endure a religious exercise that they find objectionable as the price of participation.

Rather than respectrenegade student, and therefore the government (i.e. the school) can maintain "plausible deniability" in the face of allegations that it unlawfully inserted prayer into its ceremony.

This was done in Louisiana recently in response to a request by a student there to keep the ceremony secular, as required by law. Not only was the secular student, Damon Fowler, harassed, threatened, and ostracized for asking the school to respect the law by keeping prayer out of the graduation ceremony, but his class went ahead with the prayer anyway via the stealth tactic outlined above. A student was supposed to announce a moment of silence, but instead broke into a public prayer to Jesus her savior. When the prayer was finished, the auditorium erupted into applause and cheers, as if somehow