PRAYER IN SCHOOLS is supposed to have really bothered certain atheists. But did it really? If people are really bothered, they start pulling their kids out of the public schools and home-schooling them or starting private schools. Catholics did this on a large scale, during the period of school prayer-- because there weren't *enough* prayers, and not of the right kind. Nowadays, evangelicals do this on a large scale too, partly for the same reason and partly because they rightly believe that the public schools teach immorality as much as morality. Clearly, religious people care a lot about education.

But did atheists ever do this? Not that I've heard of. This suggests to me that there was not much of a problem then, but there is a big problem now.

This also suggests a motivation for the elimination of prayer in schools. It was not a matter of the Constitution, of course-- a look at history and text shows that the Supreme Court was making policy, not law, despite its pretences. But what policy? It seems the Supreme Court was not really worried about the children of people who were bothered by religion in schools, since there was only a small number of such people. Rather, it was worried about the children of people who were *not* bothered by religion in schools. Children in religious families would be confirmed in their religion, and children in neutral families might become religious. For the Court, this needed to be stopped.