This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 6, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown. The Supreme Court has again taken up religious tolerance in the public arena.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute,

argues that the court here is only arguing over a very narrow

strip of ground, and the liberals on the court

are moving to the middle.

The court has been hearing cases about when prayer is okay at publicly sponsored events for years.

And the case that bore directly on this

was one from the state of Nebraska 30 years ago,

I think, in which they declared that yes Nebraska has a right to

have prayers before its legislative sessions very important to at that time

everyone except Brennan and Marshall was that it had always been done this way

It was done at the time at the founders there were invocations before legislative sessions and

the court distinguished and continues to distinguish that sort of case from high school graduations

for example on a couple of grounds one is that kids are different because kids are more

impersonable another is that high school graduations are a captive

audience and at a legislative session any people who happen to be in the galleries

can leave or check their cell phones or whatever and so they see legislative prayer as being something that is done for the benefit of the legislators themselves

who may or may not be inspired by it, but they're doing it in order to help themselves do a better job.

All right, so this narrow strip of territory, where we are now, what is the central argument?

Town of Greece near Rochester in New York had been bringing in rotating pastors to give

invocations and the argument that the plaintiffs made was, look town councils are kind of different from state

legislatures. Some people are there in almost a judicial capacity because they need a variance for their zoning or something.

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