Well, not being an American, I'm sure i could be wrong here but..... aren't you people supposed to practice the 'separation of church and state'??
Really the constitution is rather messy when it comes to this.
“ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof... ”
this just leaves so much room, non-legislatively for church and state to merge.
There would be problems making a national Pray to
Jesus Day. But since 'prayer' could be any religion.....
The whole thing is very silly. There is no reason why people need the state to give them a Prayer day, since they are free to pray whenever they like. Much of the intention of the founders was that government would not intervene in their choices of conscience, like religion, and this is clear in the writings of Jefferson and others. They wanted the state NOT to interfere and they made clear rules to stop this kind of interference. This left room however for people to think the state can support religion. Or should. And oddly this tends to come from people who complain the loudest about how government should be small.
Where is the need?
Even more so the Prayer in school issue. As if children coming from home, where they can be, unfortunately, be forced to pray over breakfast, need to have space to pray in class also.
Bush of course and other conseratives, as i am sure you know, use conservative, often working class values, to manpulate that group into aligning with fiscally conservative people who are not at all looking out for their interests.
Obama does not want to piss off the conservative working classes, but at the same time it is not his main support group, so he is likely to act, on this issue, more in line with the intentions of the founders.