It was the year 2001, and resident Danielle Payette of the City of Laval, Canada, sat quietly in a crowded Laval municipal council meeting. Then everyone around her rose as the chairman read a 27-word prayer asking the Lord to provide the councilors with His grace and the knowledge to run the city well. Despite a municipal regulation saying that everyone in the council chambers must stand while the prayer is read, Ms. Payette remained seated.
Ms. Payette, an atheist, said she felt stigmatized. “I was forced to show the fact that I’m a non-believer,” she said. “Religion is something extremely private and personal. It has no place at a city meeting. I’m a citizen and a taxpayer, and all faiths should be respected—atheists as much as believers.”
A brief prayer has opened council meetings in the City of Laval, just north of Montreal, since 1965. Ms. Payette had asked the City Council in 2001 to refrain from having the prayer before each meeting, and backed by the Mouvement Laïque Québecois, her case was brought before the Quebec Human Rights Commission on the basis of discrimination against her religion. The commission ruled in her favor and asked the city to drop the prayer by February 2004, but the Laval council didn’t like the idea. Laval officials said the city had only received one complaint about their prayers, and their lawyer, Jean Allaire, described the prayer as non-denominational and “neutral.” Mr. Allaire also said that the Ms. Payette’s complaint showed a “lack of tolerance toward those who believe in a higher being.”
The lawyer representing Laval, Chantal Masse, of the blue-chip Montreal law firm McCarthy Tétrault, called the short prayer session before each meeting a tradition and argued that Laval was not imposing its beliefs on Ms. Payette.
Just last month, however, the Quebec human rights tribunal ordered the City of Laval to stop the prayer, ignoring that it has become a long tradition by claiming that the prayer violates the recognition of freedom of religion of Laval residents. This decision creates a legal precedent in Quebec, and although most of the meetings have already dropped the prayer, approximately 400 other municipalities will now be required to do the same.
Have the religious rights of the people of Laval been unjustly violated for almost a half of a century? But why take away their tradition? Or maybe the real issue lies in the hearts of the people of Quebec. Fifty years ago, praying to God for guidance before a meeting was natural to those present; now, it has become an offense and a violation. Before a prayer can rightly return to its place before council meetings, the hearts of the people must turn back to God, so that a prayer can again be a good thing, not a tradition forced on people who find it offensive.
Sources:
http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/LAC/20060329/RELIGION29/Headlines/headdex/headdexNational/8/8/34/
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/news/shownews.jsp?content=n092255A
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/03/28/lavalprayers060328.html?ref=rss
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