The Supreme Court in Galloway v. The Town of Greece (NY) found that a religious invocation prior to a city council meeting or any governmental meeting as long as the “prayer” was not anti-non-Christian or proselytizing. Based on this ruling, Dan Courtney, a member of the Atheist Community of Rochester, asked to give an atheist invocation to the council’s meeting. Here is the clip of that short but historic invocation.
GREECE, N.Y. (AP) — An atheist cited the freedoms promoted by the Founding Fathers as he delivered the opening invocation Tuesday at a town meeting in a community whose leaders won a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the right to start their gatherings with a prayer.
“On July 4, 1776, the 56 men, who pledged their lives to the document that changed the course of history, agreed to the central tenet that, ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,'” Dan Courtney said at the monthly meeting of the Greece town board.
