You can’t think that way!

If the American Civil Liberties Union gets its way, the state of Virginia will be required to halt its moment-of-silence law because kids just might be praying. And we sure can’t have that!

A Virginia law requiring schools to set aside one minute at the beginning of each day for students to engage in meditation, prayer or other silent activity, has now been taken to the highest court in the land. That’s right. The ACLU is so consumed with halting independent thought in Virginia schools that they are dispatching their lawyers to the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the law.

Immediately after the moment-of-silence law was passed last year, seven Virginia families, along with the ACLU, filed suit in a federal district court asking that the minute-of-silence law be declared unconstitutional on grounds that it violated religious freedom.

The ACLU lost its case in district court last fall and lost again, in a federal appeals court, in July. Undaunted, the ACLU will now attempt to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that a moment of silence is an implicit promotion of religion. ACLU lawyers charge that the law promotes a “state-sanctioned prayer in public schools.”

The ACLU believes the Virginia law is vulnerable. While both the U.S. District Court in Alexandria and the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond have upheld the Virginia moment of silence, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar Alabama minute-of-silence law in the early 1980s.

“The minute of silence law is especially unfair for students whose religion does not allow for them to pray in public or whose prayer practices require an environment not available in a school setting,” said ACLU Virginia Executive Director Kent Willis. “In this regard, the tendency of the law is to favor majority religions over minority religions, which is strictly forbidden by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.”

Mr. Willis is acting as if the state is compelling students to drop to their knees and openly beseech the God of the Bible in prayer during the reserved moment. The truth is, teachers simply inform students that it is time to observe the minute of silence, and the kids may do as they please. They can pray. They can daydream. They can look out the window. They can even catch a catnap.

Opposition to this law is nothing but an attempt to control the minds of school-age children in the state. Apparently, the ACLU believes students are not emotionally balanced enough to have a moment of their own in which to meditate, daydream or pray.

Virginia officials who support the law say the moment of silence does guarantee students the right to pray at school – if they wish to do so – but the law places no pressure on them to pray or even not to pray.

Solicitor General William Hurd noted that the law does not require students to do anything, say anything or hear anything during the brief moment of silence, nor does it require them to make any acknowledgment. The law, he said, simply requires students to remain in their seats, be silent and not distract their classmates.

But the ACLU is not having it. A moment of silence is dangerous in their minds. The ACLU, in its desperate attempt to regulate silence in Virginia schools, has shown just how vindictive and anti-prayer it really is.