I know I will get hammered for this but the constitution does not state that you can not have prayer in school...it's meaning is that it can not have a state sponsored religion that everyone is forced to partake in. Our founding fathers believed in GOD and put his name on our money, in our pledge etc. Now for the bashing from the liberals because I have a different opinion then they do. But we live in a free country and they have that right.
The Constitution also does not say government can not pay for the construction of churches or burn infidels at the stake. Seriously. Those words are nowhere in the document.
What it DOES say is that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." And thru the 14th Amendment, that language is taken to be applicable to state and local government.
Do you seriously contend that having a school lead children in prayer (and this only addresses schools leading prayer or teaching any religious dogma as fact, not students praying on their own, or the actual study of religion) is not "respecting religion"?
The key Supreme Court decisions addressed the issue more than 35 years ago. Abbngton was in 1963
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/374/203 and Engle was in 1962
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/370/421 Both of those decisions were well before Dusty was born, let alone before he began school.
One thing I often find amusing is how many conservatives and how many of those who are most strident in their mindless insistence that the Pledge of Allegiance be recited in school (in spite of the fact that the kids are reciting something they do not even begin to understand) is that the reason it was written, and its logical actual function (to the extent that it has any), is the exact opposite of what those conservatives would want.
AndyMcFAIL is right that the author of the Pledge was Bellamy and that he was a socialist. He wrote it at a time when the American spirit was so strongly individualistic that he and other socialists were quite aware of the fact that the American public as it then existed would never accept socialism, let alone embrace it or vote for it. So he came up with the Pledge in the hope of indoctrinating kids, getting people to pledge allegiance to the all powerful state, and to gradually come to believe and accept what they were reciting. The Pledge was intended to help pave the way for socialism in this country, and, to a remarkable degree, it has done exactly that.