•

/—

SS ervice...

At Your

guistic high ground is half the
battle in practical politics.
Opponents begin the battle on
the defensive; how do you explain
opposition to an amendment call-
ing for religious freedom for all
Americans? How do you convey
to ordinary people the personal
costs of tampering with the Con-
stitution? It's just prayer, after
all.
The case against the amend-
• ment — that it will weaken con-
stitutional protections for
religious minorities — will be dif-
ficult for Jewish groups to make
without seeming like they are
more interested in legal nitpick-
ing than in addressing a nation-
al moral breakdown that a
growing majority of Americans
see as affecting- their lives in very
direct ways.
Jewish groups have to do a
more effective job explaining the
real-world dangers of tampering
with the Constitution to satisfy
the sectarian demands of a po-
litically powerful religious group.
In a factual, straightforward
fashion, they need to draw vivid
pictures of how a successful Is-
took amendment might change
federal, state and local laws, and
how those changes would affect
• those whose faith differs from the
narrow national standard Mr. Is-
took and his colleagues are try-
ing to enforce, however
indirectly.
The Istook amendment, pack-
aged as a measure to protect the
religious freedoms of all, would
fundamentally change First
Amendment jurisprudence and
\-, open the door to entirely new in-
terpretations of exactly what the
/
church-state boundary should
be. It represents a constitution-
al throw of the dice, with reper-
cussions almost impossible to
predict.
Jewish groups have to be more
effective in explaining why
church- state separation is good
for people of faith, not just athe-
• ists; when the government gets
involved in the business of sanc-
tioning certain prayers in public
settings, it inevitably becomes
entangled in deciding which re-
ligions deserve such expression
and which are somehow outside
the pale.
Jewish groups need to make
a more compelling case that the
idea of "non-sectarian" school
•
prayer is a ruse — something
/- Mr. Istook himself seemed to
confirm in an interview last year,
when he agreed that even "stu-
dent-initiated" school prayer is
bound to be sectarian, and that
he sees nothing wrong with "wit-
nessing" to Jews in public school
settings.
At the same time, Jewish
groups need to make it clear that
/- there's a big difference between
encouraging private religious ac-
tivity and trying to enforce reli-
gious participation in public
settings.

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