A moment of silence, please

Mark D. Bixby

I’m disappointed that Mayor Cathy Green’s first official act

(reinstating the invocation) was one of exclusion rather than

inclusion.

Green was quoted as saying that if anybody is bothered by an

invocation, then the solution is for that person to leave the council

chambers until the invocation has concluded. Well, that sounds more

like a problem than a solution to me.

The last thing that City Hall should ever do is exclude people

from participating in any facet of local government simply because

they pray to the wrong god or to no god at all.

Supposedly the invocation will be delivered by representatives of

various faiths. But will any Buddhists be included? Wiccans?

Tongvans? Zoroastrians? Baha’is? Hindus? Will there be an occasional

moment of silence to include the atheist point of view? Or will we

only hear from representatives of the most common Judeo-Christian

religions in keeping with the outdated stereotype of a homogenous

Orange County? Only time will tell.

Invocation proponents are fond of citing the religious roots of

our country’s founders. But they always neglect to mention that many

of those founders fled their homelands because their governments had

deemed certain religions to be acceptable and others to be

unacceptable.

By choosing who gets to deliver the reinstated invocation, this

city will be going down the road of implicitly deciding which

religions are the acceptable religions.

The July 2003 issue of Western City Magazine published by the

League of California Cities has a good article about some of the

legal pitfalls that cities can experience when they get involved with

invocations. The court case of Rubin vs. City of Burbank makes it

clear that sectarian invocations are not permitted.

Furthermore, potential mine fields await in the areas of

previewing invocation content and what to do if an invocation speaker

gives a sectarian speech anyway in violation of the rules. If there

is anybody on the City Council who has not read this article, I

strongly recommend that they do so.

The old system of an official moment of silence adroitly avoided

all of those legal issues. Nobody was advised to exclude themselves

from the council chambers. Anybody in need of divine guidance was

free to pray to the god or gods of their choosing. Any resident

wanting to give a verbal invocation was free to do so during public

comments. In short, everybody won.

I sincerely hope that in the future more council members will

eventually see the wisdom in the “moment of silence” approach.

* MARK D. BIXBY is a Huntington Beach resident. To contribute to

“Sounding Off” e-mail us at hbindy@ latimes.com or fax us at (714)

965-7174.