{"id":26695,"date":"2011-09-28T06:28:37","date_gmt":"2011-09-28T10:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=26695"},"modified":"2011-09-28T06:28:59","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T10:28:59","slug":"prayer-ban-lifted-in-houston-va","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=26695","title":{"rendered":"Prayer ban lifted in Houston VA cemetery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>COB6 sends us <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chron.com\/news\/houston-texas\/article\/VA-agrees-not-to-censor-prayer-at-Houston-cemetery-2184259.php\">a link to an article<\/a> from his undisclosed location which announces that the Department of Veterans Affairs as agreed in a court-sponsored settlement to stop preventing mourners from praying at funerals in Houston&#8217;s VA cemetery;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The documents state that VA will pay attorneys fees and expenses of $215,000, but the government admits no liability or fault, and stresses that some provisions of the agreement already were policy or practice at the department.<\/p>\n<p>Under the settlement, VA would agree &#8220;not to ban, regulate or otherwise interfere with prayers, recitations, or words of religious expression absent family objection&#8221; and to allow veterans&#8217; families to hold services with any religious or secular content they desire.<\/p>\n<p>VA also agrees not to edit or control private religious speech by speakers at VA-sponsored ceremonies or events and pledges to return a Bible, cross and Star of David to the cemetery&#8217;s chapel, which must remain open and not be used for storage or referred to as a meeting facility<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Allowing someone to pray to their own God in a government cemetery isn&#8217;t establishing a religion, so I don&#8217;t know where those gumballs at VA decided that it was a good idea to prevent prayer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>COB6 sends us a link to an article from his undisclosed location which announces that the &hellip; <a title=\"Prayer ban lifted in Houston VA cemetery\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=26695\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Prayer ban lifted in Houston VA cemetery<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26695\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}