UMD to End Graduation Prayer
According to the not always reliable
Diamondback
(hey, whaddya want? It’s a student paper), the University of Maryland
senate has voted to stop having prayers at graduation ceremonies. This
doesn’t affect individual colleges’ ceremonies, though.
It seems to have been a pretty decisive vote, too: 32-14.
The main arguments against the move seem to confuse secularism with
anti-theism:
“We need to be careful not to send the message that
secular language is seen as superior and acceptable while religious
language is seen as inferior and unacceptable,” [the university’s
Episcopalian chaplain, Peter Antoci] said.
It’s quite simple, really: if I’m at a staff meeting, and others are
talking about last night’s basketball game, and I say “Could you
please stop talking about basketball so that we can get on with the
business at hand and get out of this meeting early?”, I’m not saying
that basketball is a Bad Thing, or that talking about basketball is
bad. I’m just saying that it’s irrelevant to the purpose of the
meeting, so please do it on your own time.
According to the article, the university still employs 14, count ’em!,
14 chaplains, and I’m not aware of any movement to fire or censor them
(unless your definition of “censorship” includes denying them a
captive audience).
Of course,
some people
are appalled that this happened around the same time that
a porn flick was going to be shown on campus:
Great: Porn is ok; prayer is not.
I guess I’ll mark this one as “straw man”, since no one is suggesting
that porn be shown at graduation ceremonies.
I feel my graduation walk was irreparably cheapened because they did not show porn at the ceremony and would have been superior with a skin flick as a backdrop.
/me breaks down the strawman and makes extra bedding for the ponies. Supplies are getting ever more expensive.