It was Merith Weisman’s middle school graduation ceremony, and a Baptist minister stood at the front of the auditorium, announcing, “Please rise and praise Jesus for the accomplishments of these children today.” The Weismans, who are Jewish, exchanged glances. Should they stand?
Merith, in a teal dress and new black patent high heels, sat in front with the other graduates of the public Bishop Middle School in Providence, R.I. She whispered to a friend, “I don’t think that’s legal.”
Sitting in the middle of the auditorium, Merith’s parents, Daniel and Vivian Weisman, were having a similar conversation as her younger sister, 11-year-old Debbie, looked to her parents for guidance.
Daniel, a social work professor at Rhode Island College, whispered to his wife, “They can’t do this, can they?”
“No, but they are,” responded Vivian, who was confident the school was in the wrong. She was assistant executive director of the city’s Jewish Community Center and had for years volunteered on a committee of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island concerning church-state issues.
It was 1986. The Supreme Court had ruled against allowing prayer in public schools in the early 1960s. The line, in Vivian’s view, was clear, and the school had just stepped right over it.
The Weismans, though, stood during the prayer. Daniel and Vivian didn’t want to draw attention away from the graduates. But afterward, they spoke to a school administrator and sent the school a letter — seemingly benign actions that would soon place them at the center of the nation’s culture wars and in front of the Supreme Court.
“I always felt like this was something that happened to us, not something we did,” said Merith Weisman, now a director of community engagement at Sonoma State University in California. “They wrote a letter. That’s all, and it just took on a life of its own, and we got dragged along. Providence kept appealing.”
June 24 marks the 30th anniversary of the family’s triumph in the landmark Supreme Court ruling Lee v. Weisman, a 5-4 decision prohibiting clergy from leading graduation prayer in public schools. It comes as the Supreme Court is about to decide a new school prayer case that could reverse some of the protections from school-backed religious displays that the Weisman case enshrined.
The court heard oral arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District in April. The case concerns a former football coach in Bremerton, Wash., Joseph Kennedy, who claims the school district unjustly fired him for praying at midfield after each game. Kennedy contends he was exercising his right to free exercise of religion. The school district argues the coach was a representative of the school whose public prayers put pressure on players to join him.
Given the conservative makeup of the current Supreme Court, the justices are widely expected to support the coach, undercutting Lee v. Weisman and similar Supreme Court decisions prohibiting school prayer.