No Prayer Cards But Better Coffee on Alaska Airlines

If you've been praying for better coffee on Alaska Airlines, your prayers have been answered.  But if you need a prayer card to help you importune your gods, you'll have to bring your own.

The airline today announced that it will begin serving freshly brewed Starbucks coffee on all flights.  With slightly less fanfare, it announced it will stop providing prayer cards.

Why?  

Well, in the case of the coffee, Joe Sprague, Alaska Airlines' vice president of marketing, said the carrier was "thrilled to team up with another hometown company from Seattle."

And as for the prayer cards, Sprague ceded the floor to CEO Bill Ayer, who basically invoked diversity: "We believe it's the right thing to do in order to respect the diverse religious beliefs and cultural attitudes of all our customers and employees."

And besides that, said Sprague, the cards had only been distributed to first-class passengers for the last several years, ever since Alaska stopped dishing up meals to its rear-cabin passengers.

Ayer didn't say whether passengers had been grousing about the coffee but did say some on board had been less than eternally grateful when the prayer card landed on their tray. 

Deeply personal

"We've heard from many of you who believe religion is inappropriate on an airplane, and some are offended when we hand out the cards. Religious beliefs are deeply personal and sharing them with others is an individual choice," Sprague said in an email to Alaska's frequent flyers.

The coffee decision is likely to be relatively free of controversy.  Whether the separation of church and aviation will go down quite as well remains to be seen. At least one group is rejoicing, though.

"'May I say 'Hallejulah?' said Annie Laurie Gaylor, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. "It took 30 years, but Alaska Airlines finally listened!"

Gaylor said that her group has been complaining about the prayer cards since at least the mid-1980s. She recalled that Clara Carlson, a longtime Washington State resident who died recently at age 102, shared her “open letter to Alaska airlines” in a 1991 letter.

“The notion that it is necessary to pray, while flying with your line, is disquieting. It seems to indicate that one cannot have confidence in your pilots and mechanics,” the late Ms. Carlson wrote.

Gaylor asked her group's members to send thank you notes to CEO Ayer to counter a demand by noted Alaskan Sarah Palin, who is demanding on her Facebook page that the prayer cards be returned to the first-class meal trays. As far as we knew, she didn't mention prayer-card-deprived coach passengers.