The American Civil Liberties Union announced today that it had asked the U.S. Naval Academy to discontinue its longstanding requirement that all midshipmen attend prayers at the daily noon meal.

The ACLU’s complaint comes three years after the U.S. Air Force Academy established new guidelines on appropriate religious expression after Christian officials on its campus were accused of proselytizing.

In a letter sent to Naval Academy officials on May 2, Deborah A. Jeon, legal director for the ACLU of Maryland, argues that the academy’s practice violates students’ “religious freedom and rights of conscience,” according to an ACLU news release. A spokesman at the academy told The New York Times that the institution “does not intend to change its practice of offering midshipmen an opportunity for prayer or devotional thought during noon-meal announcements.”

In lodging its complaint, the ACLU drew on a 2003 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that supper prayers at the state-run Virginia Military Institute were unconstitutional. In a footnote in that ruling, however, the court wrote that its opinion did not “address whether, or to what extent, the military may incorporate religious practices into its ceremonies. The Virginia General Assembly, not the Department of Defense, controls VMI.” —Elyse Ashburn