City council rejects prayer proposal, mayor denounces antisemitism

A resolution calling for prayers before council meetings was soundly defeated, but not before raising questions of procedure. At various points, Nazi trolls derailed public comment periods.

The Laramie City Council rejected a proposal that would have added a prayer or invocation to the top of its meetings. Several councilors and most public commenters suggested that such an opening invocation would be inappropriate for a government body.

“Faith is very personal and I would never consider it my place to tell people how and when to, or whether to, pray,” Councilor Erin O’Doherty said.

Discussion about that proposal veered into topics such as the separation of church and state and of the city council’s own process for debating such proposals. But the council meeting was notable in more regrettable ways, too.

Both before and during the discussion of prayer, a pair of antisemitic trolls — as well as an automated voice ranting about “illegal aliens” — took up time during public comment periods.

One individual, offering comment virtually, went by the name Rudy Hess — a likely reference to Hitler’s high-ranking deputy Rudolph Hess, whose name has been used by Nazi trolls elsewhere. “Hess” claimed to live in Laramie — giving a fictional street address that was itself a neo-Nazi dog whistle — and began railing against “atheists and Jews” before Mayor Brian Harrington cut him off.

“For one, 1488 Park Boulevard does not exist in the city of Laramie,” Harrington said. “And also the antisemitism will not be welcomed in this council.”

Harrington told the Laramie Reporter he was shocked by the bigoted vitriol.

“I have been on council for five years and in that time we have never confronted anything like this,” he said. “The unabashed hate took me by surprise. It isn’t how we treat one another in Laramie. You hear about this sort of thing in other places but to have it happen here was so ugly.”

Antisemitism is not new to Laramie, however. In 2018, there was a string of antisemitic and white supremacist incidents on the University of Wyoming campus. In 2021, a UW employee received an antisemitic email so intense it qualified as a threat, according to authorities. And earlier this year, an Albany County Commissioner fought against changing the name of a nearby “Swastika Lake.”

Harrington said the council would need a better way to address these disruptions in the future.

“The council will be considering changes to our code of conduct at our next meeting — November 7 — that should allow greater ability of the mayor to stop hateful comments,” he said.

Thomas Jefferson, God and Pandora’s Box

Resolution 2023-78 would have seen the council begin its meetings with an invocation — the contours and varieties of that invocation to be decided by later policies.

Councilor Joe Shumway was the only member to speak in favor of the resolution during the council’s meeting Tuesday.

“Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence … four different times he mentioned God and the importance of God in the forming of the Constitution, which I believe was divinely inspired,” Shumway said.

The Declaration famously begins with a reference to a “Creator” and the “unalienable rights” he allegedly confers on people. But the Constitution’s Bill of Rights begins by demanding that Congress make no law “respecting an establishment of religion” — setting down in its opening lines the separation of church and state.

Several public commenters objected to the idea of starting government meetings with prayers, with at least two of them explicitly citing the Constitution in their arguments.

“I believe in prayer, and also believe in the Constitution, and I don't believe prayer should be divisive,” said Roger McDaniel, a recently retired pastor. “Even among those who pray or those who identify themselves as Christians, which would be the majority, we don't all pray alike … You will be opening up a Pandora's Box needlessly.”

The only public commenter to speak in favor of prayer before meetings was the fascist troll referenced above.

The resolution ultimately failed on a 1-8 vote. Shumway cast the single vote in the resolution’s favor.

But the unorthodox way this resolution found itself before the full council was a matter of anger and deliberation for several of the councilors.

Carts, Horses and Work Sessions

Shumway was the only councilor to ultimately support the resolution, but he was not the only one to raise the issue. Councilor Brandon Newman had joined Shumway in calling for a work session to discuss the topic of prayers before meetings.

During a typical work session, councilors and city staff have conversations about broad topics. The councilors might direct staff to craft a resolution or ordinance for a vote during an upcoming meeting, but they do not take votes or set policies during work sessions. The goal is discussion.

Any two councilors can call for a work session topic, and Newman especially was hoping for just such a work session to gauge interest in starting their meetings with invocations.

But Councilor Andi Summerville preempted that work session, bringing the resolution herself. The goal was to force the issue before it could take up a meeting. Summerville told her fellow councilors she wanted to save the staff time that might be required to prepare for such a work session.

“Doing just cursory research on the issue, this is incredibly complex,” she said. “There are Supreme Court rulings and governing policies around this stuff. It is not easy. How do you decide who gets to do it? What type of process do you have? How long? How do you exclude? Do you exclude? All of those questions are incredibly complex and the staff time that would be required to bring a work session forward is immense.”

If council is going to reject the proposal anyway, Summerville suggested, better to do it straight out.

This didn’t sit well with Newman, who said the council needed the preliminary discussion that could have occurred during a work session.

“We're putting the cart before the horse,” he said.

Newman said allowing councilors to force issues as Summerville had could break the whole system. Any councilor, sufficiently motivated, could preempt a series of work sessions, forcing every issue before it had a chance to be calmly discussed.

“Now I feel like part of me wants to go write resolutions for every one of these (planned work sessions) and put them on that agenda just to prove a point — because I feel like that's what was happening with this resolution,” Newman said. “I feel like it was put on here to prove a point. And I think it proves the point very well. The problem is we could have went without all this, and we could have had a simple work session and said, ‘You know what? We don't support this.’”

Newman asked Mayor Harrington what would stop him from doing such a thing, if he decided to do it.

“Nothing,” the mayor admitted. “Other than you need a second for all of them. And you can motion until you're blue in the face. I guess it's just sort of the appreciation of keeping things in order.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story indicated that the “Constitution begins by demanding” the separation of church and state. But it is the Bill of Rights, the Constitution’s most famous part, that begins this way. There are several articles in the Constitution outlining the role of the presidency and other technical aspects of the United States government that come before the Bill of Rights.