I received a second reply from the exec director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, and I have to say that the biggest problem, in regards to religion, with nearly all civil liberties organizations is the fact that they are ignorant (whether willfully or not) of what the 1st Amendment means. The reply I got was polite (as I was polite myself) and said that we would just have to disagree on what the establishment clause means. There is just no honest way a thinking person can look at the clause and think the founders meant that specific prayers given at public/government meetings are to be outlawed. The founders would not have possibly meant to ban these prayers by public officials at government meetings, city/county commission/council meetings, etc. Why do we know this? The founders themselves, speaking as government officials, as reps of the nation, often times used prayer as part of their talks and nearly always envoked the name of the lord (they were clearly referring to their christian god, as the new nation was uniquely christian itself.)
They wouldn't have possibly meant to outlaw the things that they did themselves! It's just not an honest claim that you can disagree on what the founders made abundantly clear. Even if the founders never did this sort of thing themselves, they specifically said that government can make no law infringing on the religious freedom of the people...when a court rules that the 1st Amendment denies a public official his or her right to pray to a specific God, that is clearly the government (via the courts) denying religious freedoms in the form of a law. That is as plain as day, and no honest American can deny this.
That's the problem with civil liberties groups. They have their agenda, and they blatantly ignore what the founders made so clear. You can disagree with prayers to a Christian God being said by government officials, speaking in their official capacities as servants of the state, and that's fine...it's a free nation (at least in some ways), and you can disagree all you want. But, no man has the right to trump the rights the founders said could not be denied by ANY man, since they were given to us all by God himself. That's what the ICLU is doing here, and other civil liberties groups like the ACLU do the same thing everyday. No American should use the agenda of any group to attack the rights that were once guaranteed to us, but are now (thanks to sympathetic courts with judges who are now creating new laws, instead of merely interpreting them) being eroded on a daily basis.