Council seeks divine guidance

By BRENT SHRUM Western News Reporter

Future Libby City Council meetings will open with a prayer, the council has decided.

At its regular monthly meeting on Monday, the council approved a proposal from the Libby Ministerial Association to start each meeting with a plea for divine guidance. Association president Rick Weinert told the council his group wants to have a representative at each meeting to "ask God's blessing, God's direction for your meetings."

Weinert said he had already provided the council with copies of letters from the governor's office and the Rutherford Institute - a conservative legal resource center - supporting the legality of the proposal.

"I don't think that there are any legal problems with that," he said. "We just want to make ourselves available to serve you in that way."

Councilman Doug Roll said his understanding of the law is that it would be acceptable to open public meetings with prayer as long as the prayer is not led by the council itself.

"We would have to have it open to everyone, be it Islam or something like that, if someone wanted to come and do that," Mayor Tony Berget added.

Councilman Walt McElmurry made a motion to approve the proposal, and Stu Crismore seconded the motion. City Attorney Scott Spencer offered no objection.

"I come from a church that prays everyplace, all the time," he said.

Bob Havens, pastor of the Nazarene Church in Libby, said the council acknowledges the existence of a supreme being in its recital of the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of each meeting. Adding a prayer isn't a big step, he suggested.

"You've already recognized that there is a God and there is 'one nation under God,' and now we're just invoking him to give us wisdom," he said.

"Amen," McElmurry said.

The motion passed without objection.