PHOENIX — Once again, the Phoenix City Council has voted to have a prayer said at council meetings. However, the invocation would have to be given exclusively by chaplains for the police and fire departments.
A 7-2 vote Wednesday is the latest twist in a fiery debate that began after a group of Satanists were scheduled to give the opening prayer at a council meeting in February.
Rather than let followers of the Satanic Temple pray, the council voted last month to replace the invocation with a "moment of silent prayer and reflection." City leaders said Phoenix would have faced a costly lawsuit if it kept holding a prayer and rejected the Satanist's request to pray, as some council members advocated.
But the decision to replace the spoken prayer with a moment of silence has since drawn protests from some council members, residents and religious leaders. They said the city's move was akin to banning prayer and gave the Satanists a victory.
On Wednesday, the council had to reconsider that decision after two residents submitted a petition calling for the council to reinstate the invocation. Councilman Jim Waring motioned that the council approve the petition with an amendment requiring that the city's police or fire chaplains only give the prayer.
But the vote was not the final decision. Council members must now vote on a specific ordinance to make the rule change. City staff still needs to draft that ordinance, and a final vote is expected in a few weeks.
"I think we’re in a good place, but the fight is not done yet," Waring said after the vote. "I feel like the last vote was hasty ... we should work harder to try and preserve something that was important to a lot of people."
Mayor Greg Stanton opposed the vote and he suggested the move could land the city in legal trouble. He said the U.S. Constitution requires all faith traditions to be invited to the table if the city holds public prayer.
“I thought that the policy we passed a few weeks ago struck the right balance," said Stanton.
Legal arguments also proliferated before the council's February vote to replace the spoken prayer with a moment of silence. At the time, a group of four councilmen had proposed a plan to allow council members to take turns inviting different religious groups to give the prayer, effectively uninviting the Satanists.
City Attorney Brad Holm said that would be a violation of the First Amendment, if applied retroactively. He said the city could not change its invocation practice to specifically block a member of the Satanic Temple from speaking. Members of the Satanic Temple had vowed to sue if the council adopted the earlier proposal of the four councilmen.
However, Holm suggested the proposal council members approved Wednesday, allowing only city chaplains to give the prayer, would likely prevail if the city gets sued.
"The answer is it’s constitutional in accordance with a long line of cases, so the probabilities are that it would be upheld by a court," Holm said of Wednesday's council decision. "But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be challenged in this particular case, and I’d rather not say in open session what I suspect the outcome of a challenge (would be)."
Follow Dustin Gardiner on Twitter: @dustingardiner
