Uproar over scrapping legislature prayer

TORONTO, May 7 (UPI) -- The Liberal provincial premier of the Canadian province of Ontario created an uproar over suggesting dropping the Lord's Prayer from legislative proceedings.

Premier Dalton McGuinty instructed an all-party committee to look into the daily reading of the Lord's Prayer earlier this year and by last Monday a government Internet link seeking comments crashed, the Canwest News Service reported.

Recently, more than 6,000 people have logged on, the majority of them calling for the Christian prayer to be left as part of protocol, Toronto radio 680 News reported.

The director of information systems for the province, Bob Cowieson, told Canwest it wasn't the volume of Web traffic that caused the outage.

"It was our first interactive site and we were learning how to configure (it)," he said.

The site will stop accepting submissions May 15, and McGuinty said Tuesday he wants the committee to do its job and said he won't retract the call for debate.

"I think we have a responsibility to make sure all people feel truly at home here," he said.