KEY-NOTE
SPEAKER: PROFESSOR JEREMY MAYER
Professor Jeremy
Mayer was a keynote speaker on September 26, 2005,
at a symposium
entitled “Church and State: Blurring the Line?” sponsored by the
Lou Frey Institute of Politics and Government, at the University of Central Florida
in Orlando. The other keynote speakers were Ralph Reed, former director of the
Christian Coalition, and Nadine Strossen, National President of the ACLU. Mayer's
talk was entitled “One Nation Under Whose God?: Two Modern Establishment
Cases.” This was his second time keynoting a Frey Institute symposium,
having previously spoken in the spring of 2003.
Mayer’s talk focused on Lee
v. Weisman and Rosenberger vs. UVA, two establishment
cases involving the role of religion at public educational institutions. “To
begin, I had former Congressman Lou Frey read the prayer from the Weisman case,
while the audience of about 900 people stood,” Mayer says. “Then
I started my lecture by asking if what we’d done had just violated the
constitution. The prayer, though very nondenominational, was ruled unconstitutional
for a middle school graduation, because of the psychologically coercive pressures
it placed on unwilling, non-religious student listeners.”
Keynote
speaker
Jeremy Mayer
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The
Rosenberger case, on the other hand, dealt
with student activities money going to an evangelical
magazine, designed to convert undergraduates
to born-again Christianity, Mayer said. “By
a vote of 5-4, the court ruled that it would
be unconstitutional to deny such a magazine
funding, even at a public school, because funding
only non-religious magazines would favor ‘irreligion’ over
religion,” he explains. “Through
my talk, I hoped to get the students to understand
how complex establishment cases can be, how
much specific fact patterns matter, and how
vital the two centrist justices, O'Connor and
Kennedy, have become. Roughly the same court
ruled on these two issues, in radically different
ways, with those two justices in the majority
on both.” Mayer concluded with a brief
discussion of where intelligent design is going
in the federal judiciary.
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