There are two things our parents told us to never discuss in public - politics and religion. So, when you ask me what I worship, I have to say I worship the freedom to choose. There's a reason for this. We all have our own opinions, and what makes it difficult is this: Nobody is really right on the matter. We don't know, for sure if there is a God, or if Christ exists, or if any religious belief, in fact, is right. We may have faith that God exists, in whichever form the believer chooses to believe. The faith in some is so strong that it becomes fact in their minds, but is that faith fact? We have a federal Constitution that guarantees us the right to freedom of religion. That should guarantee us the right to not believe in a God as well, or to not believe in a specific form of organized religion. That should give Muslims the right to worship as they see fit; to the Jewish among us to practice their faith. Hare Krishnas, in a perfect United States, would not be ridiculed for their saffron robes and chants. And President-Elect Barack Obama should not have had to defend himself from claims about being a Muslim. In a perfect country with perfect freedom of religious beliefs, that question should not have come up or mattered. But it did. Well, it's a cold, snowy night here where I live in Eastern Ohio, and when it's cold, I get online and play around, visiting that grandaddy of social networks, facebook.com. I saw that a photograph of my high school alma mater's football team, praying, was posted. I should have known better - but I didn't. I asked "when did they become a religious school." WELL. The father of one of the boys proceeded to tell me how it was a religious group formed by students who choose to pray before the games. Well, that's fine. Then he told me how the church on the corner invites all the boys up for a meeting/dinner before the games. Woah...treading on dangerous ground here. Then he proceeded to go on to say how there are two ministers on the sidelines of the football games, and how they have prayer meetings in the field house before practices and the games. Now, to me, that's treading dangerously on creating an organized religious service on taxpayer property. Even worse, it's creating a sense of peer pressure that would lead the football players to participate, whether they believe or not. But then it got even worse. Seems there is a young exchange student, of the Muslim faith attending the school and playing football this year. According to the dad, the young man "led a Christian prayer before the game." Further, the dad saw nothing wrong with that. "It's the duty of Christians to save other people's souls," he said. Stop right there! That young man is alone in a small town, away from his parents and family and religion and everything he holds dear. He's playing football on a high school football team in a town that's apparently a notch in the proverbial Bible belt. And now he's forgotten the teachings of his parents and countrymen long enough to lead his teammates in a prayer from their religion - and nobody sees anything wrong with that? His parents sent him here to further his education. I'm pretty sure they didn't send him here to forsake the teachings of his religion. Would he have led that prayer if there was not that group mentality? Of course not. But there he was, leading a prayer to Jesus Christ and to a God that he did not believe in, in support of his teammates who do. Do those teammates have the right to believe and pray? Of course they do. Do they, and probably their parents and other adults have the right to coerce those who do not believe and sway them their way? Not in the America that has the right to freedom of religion, they don't. So now that I'm persona non grata on Facebook for saying what I thought of all that, it made me realize that hopefully, change really is coming to America. In this country, people should be able to believe, or not to believe, as they see best. They should not be coerced into believing by people who think their God is the most powerful one, and they should not be part of a group mentality that believes its duty is to convert other people. These past few years, the conservative groups in America have somehow made others think that if they're not Christians - if they don't believe in a certain way - then they're just not Americans. Funny, when our founding fathers came here, they were escaping the forced religious beliefs of the British. We called those people heroes.