You still do not answer my question.
I know one Wiccan, and although I do not know much about their religion, I do know that she is a law-abiding, moral and decent person. She doesn't toss babies into fire. She is civilized. So, I'm not sure how a Wiccan wanting to pray at a public meeting pees on the Constitution. Please enlighten me.
Just my opinion, of course... If city officials decide to open a meeting with prayer, it will be a prayer that those city officials believe has meaning.
If those officials are muslims, it will probably be a muslim prayer. If they are Christians and Jews, it will probably be a preacher or rabbi leading the prayer. If they are in private, one of the officials might lead the prayer himself, but he probably won't do that in public.
I doubt those officials have any faith in the efficacy of a wiccan prayer, so it would make no sense for them to ask for such a prayer. That would not stop a wiccan from praying on their behalf, though. Asking for prayer is not establishing a religion, but it is meaningless to ask for a prayer you have no faith in.
When you find wiccans on the city council, they will probably want a wiccan prayer spoken. Since that would probably offend the non-wiccans on the council, they will probably discontinue the practice of public prayer. Its human. You may not like it, but you have to leave room for humans to be human. You have surely figured out by now that its pointless to force your beliefs on the majority.
I am often in the minority, and it doesn't upset me. I am not offended if the majority does not agree with me, I would be shocked if they did.
I know one Wiccan, and although I do not know much about their religion, I do know that she is a law-abiding, moral and decent person. She doesn't toss babies into fire. She is civilized. So, I'm not sure how a Wiccan wanting to pray at a public meeting pees on the Constitution. Please enlighten me.
You have misread my response at a couple of points. I tried to to make a distinction between what the Constitution provides and what the Framers of the Constitution intended. The point was to demonstrate the unspoken assumptions that the Founders worked from, and how their failure to encode these assumptions into the document allowed for consequences that they had never envisioned. You will (I hope) by re-reading my response see that the word "civilized" is being used within the context of eighteenth-century assumptions, not ours.
Closer attention to my response should also show that I did not equate wiccans with baby-roasters or bull-sacrificers, but used an outlandish comparison to show how unlikely the Framers of the Constitution would have imagined it that anyone in the world they envisioned would return to a religion that they considered long-dead. No equation of the two was intended.
I have known a couple of Wiccans myself, and I agree that they are generally nice people, not given to child sacrifice or the ritual beheadings of cats on anything like a regular basis. I do know a little about modern wicca because one of my students who was getting into it kindly provided me with some of the stuff he was reading for a college coven. As far as I could tell, it was harmless, if slightly silly, stuff, and there was a frank admission that what was being taught as wicca was largely unconnected with genuine ancient practices and that a lot of it was being made up as they went along. I regarded it as a play-time religion or "belief accessory" and didn't give it much thought afterwards. Perhaps there are other, more serious, better informed schools of wiccan practice out there. I don't know.
That said, whether or not a wiccan wishing to pray at a public gathering is "peeing on the Constitution" (not my phrase--read again) depends on his or her motives and the sort of gathering that the person is attending. I have been present at a few public occasions where "alternative" prayers have been offered--or the request for "standard" prayers objected to--and in neither case did I feel that either party was acting out of a love for their alternative religion , or out of a desire to preserve religious diversity, but in an attempt to push their views into the faces of the majority present and outrage or hurt them. This is, as I said, "pee[ing] on the sort of nation that the Constitution was intended to produce." As a group or public prayer is generally assumed to reflect the wishes of most of the people there (or what else is it for?), it is usually framed in a way that most people can give assent to. Jews, Muslims, Christians and Hindus can at least respond favorably to the word "God" though they mean different things by it; a person praying publically to a frog (just an example, NOT what wiccans do, I know, so don't tell me)is doing so for a very different reason and will get a very different response.
So, does a Wiccan have a right to pray at a public gathering if invited to do so? The Constitution as I understand it gives him or her the right. But I have to admit I would suspect the motives of a person who would do so with no one else of his or her faith present. If I, as a Christian, went to a meeting of largely Jewish businessmen and ended my prayer with "in Christ's Name," I would be a fool not to expect a chilly reception, and worse than a fool if that had been the intended response.