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The ordinance approved by the Minneapolis City Council last month removing restrictions on the hours that mosques may play amplified calls to prayer from their rooftops is a laudable way to reach out to the city's Muslim community, which includes the largest native Somali population in the United States.
By extending the time for the amplified calls beyond the previous 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. boundaries to an indefinite period will allow Muslims to play the call to prayer the customary five times a day, rather than only the three or four times that were feasible under the pre-existing rule.
But this newspaper's editorial blessing of the new measure overlooked several of its problems ("Call to prayer is a call to inclusion," April 13).
A major issue is one of the pillars of the First Amendment. Under existing interpretation of the amendment's establishment clause, governmental bodies may not give preferential treatment to religious groups or religious practices. While there is necessarily some flexibility in practice, the Minneapolis measure is clearly designed to give preference to one particular religious sect, Muslims, a form of favoritism that is not condoned under this provision.
Courts have devised a three-part test for determining the validity of measures challenged under the establishment clause, derived from a 1971 Supreme Court ruling, Lemon v. Kurtzman. The questions are: 1) Does the law or government action in question have a primarily secular purpose? 2) Is its principal effect to advance religion? And 3) would it require "excessive entanglement" in religion by the government or the courts?
This three-pronged standard has been the source of substantial unease, including among Supreme Court justices themselves. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, in his customary colorful language, equated the "Lemon test" in a subsequent opinion to a "ghoul in a late night horror movie that is repeatedly killed and buried" only to rise again as it "stalks" First Amendment religious jurisprudence.