The Right kind of prayer

I think it is a bad idea when government officials attend overtly religious events in their official capacity. Still, it is a fine line when a state governor attends the ground-breaking opening ceremony for a new factory and the ceremony is quite religious:

Beshear attended a groundbreaking ceremony in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, for a new factory run by FlexFilm, a company based in India that makes materials for packaging, printing, insulation and other purposes. The plant represents a $180 million investment, and is expected to create 250 jobs in Kentucky. As the local newspaper the News-Enterprise reports, the groundbreaking included a Hindu ceremony, the bhoomi poojan.

The governor's Republican opponent was not pleased:

“He’s there participating with Hindu priests, participating in a religious ceremony,” Williams said. “They can say what they want to. He’s sitting down there with his legs crossed, participating in Hindu prayers with a dot on his forehead with incense burning around him. I don’t know what the man was thinking.”

Just in case you get the idea that this fellow is objecting to mixing religion and state, he clarified that it wasn't the prayers that he minded. They just had to be the Right kind:

To get down and get involved and participate in prayers to these polytheistic situations, where you have these Hindu gods that they are praying to, doesn’t appear to me to be in line with what a governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky ought to be doing.

Me, I think there is no Right kind of prayer. And government officials should stay out of it in any official capacity. Having said that, if I were a government official and I had to attend an event that started with a prayer, I'd bow my head and keep with the ethos of what's happening. At that point, it's about respecting the host, not about religion.