{"id":3120,"date":"2012-01-27T18:44:41","date_gmt":"2012-01-27T18:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3120"},"modified":"2012-01-27T18:44:41","modified_gmt":"2012-01-27T18:44:41","slug":"ostracized","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3120","title":{"rendered":"Ostracized"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <i>Times <\/i>introduces us to Jessica Ahlquist, a young woman who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/01\/27\/us\/rhode-island-city-enraged-over-school-prayer-lawsuit.html\">sued her local school district<\/a> for displaying a prayer in the high school auditorium. Jessica identifies as an atheist and became the target of death threats after a judge ruled that the prayer display is unconstitutional. While the prayer is fairly bland&#8211;it asks for God to help the students be nice kids&#8211;it clearly advocates a religious perspective and has no place in a public school. That Jessica is now a pariah in her small Rhode Island town isn&#8217;t surprising, but it&#8217;s still distressing. Jessica didn&#8217;t object to the prayer itself; merely its placement in a government building. But many of her neighbors seemed to interpret her objections as a personal attack on their faith. I realize that belief is deeply entwined with the symbols of that belief, but I can&#8217;t understand how people can invest so much significance in a prayer that has less punch than a Saltine cracker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Times introduces us to Jessica Ahlquist, a young woman who sued her local school district for displaying a prayer in the high school auditorium. Jessica identifies as an atheist and became the target of death threats after a judge ruled that the prayer display is unconstitutional. While the prayer is fairly bland&#8211;it asks for <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3120' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-Ok","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}