Peachtree City Councilwoman Suzanne Brown and The Constitution: Whose Prayer Counts?

If you look up the word “irony” in the dictionary, you might see a picture of Peachtree City Councilwoman, Suzanne Brown, and not a very flattering one.

At the Peachtree City City Council meeting on September 17^th, I was one of 29 citizens being appointed to serve on our city’s volunteer boards, which oversee public art, traffic management, youth programs, tourism and more. It’s a privilege and an honor to be asked to do this work, and we willingly invest our time in these boards because we love Peachtree City, and want to help make it even better. 

That night, the City Council meeting, for once, moved like a meeting is supposed to: efficient, upbeat, over almost before it started. I have sat through enough of these to know that that is rare. It felt like a good omen. Then we got to the final item on the agenda: Council/Staff Topics, and the good omen came to a screeching halt. 

Councilwoman Suzanne Brown proudly announced “two minor items” she intends to place on the next meeting’s agenda. Item one: mandate an invocation at the start of every City Council meeting, after the Pledge of Allegiance, so that prayer becomes an official, on-the-record part of how our government conducts its business. (Her second proposed agenda item was eliminating the town’s burn ban. Fine. Nobody’s civil liberties hinge on brush piles. But I digress…)

Sit with the audacity of the phrase, “minor item,” in this context. Any government body voting on whether to require prayer before it can serve its function is not minor. It is the kind of thing wars have been fought over. It is the kind of thing the First Amendment exists specifically to end any debate over, permanently, so that we never again have to have city councils decide whose god gets a seat at the table.

And by the way, we already have a table set perfectly for that. Every City Council meeting currently includes a moment of silence after the Pledge, a genuinely elegant solution: pray to Jesus, pray to Allah, pray to nobody, meditate on your grocery list, it’s yours and nobody’s watching. That’s the deal our government struck with a religiously diverse public, and it works. 

What Suzanne Brown wants is not an addition to that deal. It’s a demotion of it, and everybody understands exactly why. This isn’t Suzanne Brown’s first trip to this particular well. She has raised this so many times, in so many meetings, that the Council already caved once, quietly tacking an invocation onto the five minutes before the official meeting starts, presumably so we can all pretend it isn’t really Council business. 

I have sat through a number of these pre-meeting prayers, and can tell you with total confidence they are never delivered by an imam, a rabbi, a monk, a pujari, a lama, or a mullah. Funny how “inclusive” invocations in some communities always seem to land on the same deity.

Then came the part of the evening that would be the best political comedy I’ve seen in years, if it weren’t so quietly poisonous.

Fresh off announcing she wants elected officials to vote on the record about compulsory prayer at their meetings, Suzanne Brown went on to proclaim with joy that, “It’s Constitution Day!”

Then she stood up to model a t-shirt that read, “The Constitution Matters.” She believes this so strongly that she said she was standing, “because the Constitution really does matter. If you think it doesn’t, you need to study the Constitution.” She then gave us a lecture on the U.S. Constitution, touting its establishment of “protected rights” and “core liberties.” 

This is where her picture gets etched in next to the word irony. 

She launched into her lengthy statement on the history and value of the Constitution exactly 45 seconds after sharing that she would (once again) be demanding mandated public prayer by elected officials at government meetings. But in truth, she wants prayers to her lord & savior at the start of each meeting, and doesn’t understand why anyone would have a problem with the government imposing that on everyone. Believe me, the last thing Suzanne Brown wants is for City Council meetings to open with, “as-salamu ʿalaykum,” followed by the crowd responding, “wa ʿalaykum as-salam.”

This is not new in America, and the very Constitution Suzanne Brown proclaims to revere has already settled it, repeatedly. The Supreme Court struck down state-composed school prayer back in 1962 in Engel v. Vitale, on the theory that government has no business writing anybody’s prayers, or requiring any. More recently, in 2014’s Town of Greece v. Galloway, the Court allowed legislative prayer to continue, but only on the condition that it not become a tool of coercion or an endorsement of one faith over the rest. A city that mandates prayer, then only ever produces one flavor of prayer, is not clearing that bar. It is doing the limbo right under it.

This is the thing Suzanne Brown referred to as “a minor item,” something so small that it would be meaningless if it didn’t…oh, I don’t know…violate the Constitution and the very foundation of religious freedom this country was founded on. Seriously, Ms. Brown…who actually needs to study the Constitution? 

I want to be generous here. I really do. But you simply cannot make a stronger case against yourself than standing up in a t-shirt celebrating the United States Constitution after asking the government to compel prayer, one of the exact things the Constitution was written to forbid. That is not hypocrisy so much as hypocrisy’s Olympic gold medal round. Orwell would have rejected this scene as too on-the-nose. This was either guileless arrogance or colossal stupidity, or the worst of all infractions, the “I make rules for thee, but not for me” position of so many who share Ms. Brown’s political beliefs these days. She wants all of the protections of the Constitution for herself, so long as she can still infringe on the rights of others at will, as an elected official. 

Haven’t we all had enough of that? 

Watch it for yourself. [https://www.youtube.com/live/pnV-gxybdis?si=wf2POtvax_LR0AMq&t=4689] Watch the prayer agenda get announced, watch the pro-Constitution shirt pop up, watch three uninterrupted minutes about liberty pour out of the same mouth that just tried to legislate away somebody else’s right to be free from government mandated religion. 

I don’t think Suzanne Brown is a cartoon villain twirling a mustache over the Bill of Rights. I think this is something more familiar and, frankly, more common among her cohort these days: a sincere belief in liberty that quietly stops being sincere the moment it’s someone else’s liberty you’re supposed to be protecting. Someone who doesn’t look like you, doesn’t speak your language, doesn’t conform to your definition of family, or doesn’t pray to your god. 

Yes, Suzanne, the Constitution matters, as you stated. It always matters. It doesn’t stop mattering when it’s inconvenient. I guess for you, rights are sacred, until they belong to the Muslim family, the atheist teacher, the Hindu shop owner sitting in the audience during that moment of silence, free for now to use it however she chooses.

Suzanne Brown wants the Constitution framed on the wall and splayed across her chest. She’d also like the authority to override the parts of it that protect everyone who doesn’t pray the way she does. You cannot hold both of those positions and call yourself its defender. You can only call yourself its opponent with better merch.

If Suzanne Brown genuinely wants the people of Peachtree City to understand what the Constitution protects, here’s a proposal more useful than a t-shirt: leave the moment of silence exactly as silent as it already is. Let every person in that room fill it, or not fill it, however their own conscience tells them to. And while you’re at it, nix the public prayer preceding meetings. We didn’t need it before Suzanne Brown was elected to City Council and we don’t need it now. 

That is not a small courtesy. It is the whole idea behind the founding of the United States of America, where we the people, in order to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, ordained and established a Constitution on September 17^th, 1787, which has been guiding and protecting us ever since. That’s the document worth standing up for, no matter what your shirt says.