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What are you talking about? No one is making them "conform" to anything. Unless the spoken word is "making to conform", in which case I sure hope they stifle the valedictorian at the same time!
The ONLY thing they have to do...is sit quietly and listen to whatever is being said...no one is making them believe it and no one is making them live it...as far as peers go at any rate.
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From the Supreme Court ruling that banned prayer at public high school graduation ceremonies:
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As we have observed before, there are heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools. Our decisions in [Engel] and [Abington] recognize, among other things, that prayer exercises in public schools carry a particular risk of indirect coercion. The concern may not be limited to the context of schools, but it is most pronounced there. What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_v._Weisman