Rick Santorum recently said he felt "like throwing up" when he heard a speech where John Kennedy stated his commitment to the principle of maintaining a rigid wall between religious belief's and politics. He went on to say he doesn't believe the separation of church and state is absolute, and apparently that is not an uncommon view among religious conservatives.
Santorum is one of the candidates prone to talk about the Constitution being right up there with the Bible as holy text. It makes me wonder if he ever really uses either document for anything other than to provide support for his personal ambitions.
When the 13 colonies got together to draft a constitution first they drafted the body of the Constitution which addresses the organization of the Federal Government and divided up the powers between the State governments and the Federal Government. Then, specifically to protect individual liberty from the powers of the State, they drafted the 10 amendments. The very first amendment addressed religion, saying the Government shall neither establish, or interfere with a religion. The 13 colonies were largely populated by people and their descendants who had fled Europe to a remote, wild and dangerous continent to escape governments that used Religion to coerce behavior. The basic goal of the first amendment's religion clauses was to insure freedom from religion enforced by the state.
When you look at political issues with religious overtones that are prominent today, religion isn't the victim. What you find are religious conservatives trying to use the power of the state to coerce women into not having abortions. Or trying to use the power of the Government to deny gay citizens rights that are available to all other citizens, like the right to serve in the military, or legally form a couple for a partnership in life.
It seems like some religious conservatives are so committed to their beliefs they can't tolerate the notion the constitution forbids using government to impose their beliefs on others. Which is really odd when they profess to be Christians, since the Constitution is entirely consistent with what Jesus taught.
Jesus recognized there were laws of man, that we enact to run our own affairs among one another, and laws of god. What made him a revolutionary in his day was that he preached a strict segregation between the two. In Jewish law God's law was to be enforced by men, Jesus's message was that sin was an issue between the individual and God. Unfortunately this was so revolutionary he had to choose his words carefully to avoid arrest, so you actually have to read his words and think about their implications. Think about John 1:3 where the officials of the Temple brought a women caught in adultery to Jesus. They sought to get Jesus to say something that would be heretic so they could arrest him. They confronted him and said the law of Moses says the women should be stoned to death, so what did he say. He avoided arrest but made clear his point, not by saying Moses was wrong, but by saying why Moses was wrong. He told them that whoever had never sinned should cast the first stone.
2000 years later we still have candidates for President (and Religious leaders) loudly proclaiming to be Christians who have not grasped the distinction between mans law and gods law that is enshrined in the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. They are, like the Temple officials who confronted Jesus, still trying to usurp Gods power to judge that people are committing sin and use the power of the state to coerce what they deem to be right behavior.
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2 comments:
While I share your political views about the importance of the "wall of separation," I disagree with the historical justification you claim for this doctrine.
You are correct in observing the basic purpose and motivation memorialized in the Bill of Rights. However, I would argue that you read far more into the Establishment Clause than was originally intended. Indeed, you pervert its originally understood meaning and effect.
The Constitution, as you correctly note, clearly intends to divvy-up powers between the Federal and state governments. And the Bill of Rights further was intended as acknowledgement of some basic rights of individuals against governmental power, seen as the birthright of Englishmen. But any historical analysis must begin with the fact that such protections stood, originally, as bulwarks against ONLY the Federal Government, and not the states. "Congress shall make no law, ..." makes that clear.
You write that "(t)he very first amendment addressed religion, saying the Government shall neither establish, or interfere with a religion." Important to the analysis is recognizing that "the Government," as intended by the framers and ratifiers of the First Amendment, meant ONLY the Federal Government. This is an uncontroversial reading of the history, given that many states at that time had explicitly established churches and religions, which continued untouched by the First Amendment's passage, for some until even after the Civil War.
The implication is obvious: The framers did not see established churches and government involvement in religion as a violation of individual rights and liberties, either those derived naturally or from the authority of the state. The framers were explicitly agnostic on the question of state involvement with religion; they were antithetical only to the involvement of the newly created Federal Government.
This leads to the conclusion that the Establishment Clause was not intended as an acknowledgement of any individual right, but rather was a structural right of the state. It acknowledged federalism, not individual civil liberty.
Obviously, the state of the law today does not reflect this history. As with all its neighboring clauses of the First Amendment, the Establishment Clause has been "incorporated" by the Fourteenth Amendment to extend to state limitations, congruent to those binding the Federal Government. But, it must be asked, what exactly is it that has been incorporated? How has a Constitutional protection, originally intended as not a substantive judgement on the question of establishment or non-establishment, but rather a structural protection of localities and states to decide such issues locally, come to strip just such a protection from its intended beneficiary?
What does it mean to "incorporate" federal non-interference with the state, against the state?
Many scholars, commentators, and even judges claim that Establishment Clause jurisprudence is at best confused and incoherent, and at worst pernicious and deleterious to principled Constitutional decisionmaking. While I might agree with your pragmatic rationale, and your philosophical concerns, I fear that without historical bases your arguments are vulnerable. And given the present drift of our "judicial superiors," I predict we're going to increasingly see these vulnerabilities probed and exploited. And I would argue that those who ignore the historical disparity between the originally intended doctrine, and the emergent doctrine under assault today, will be less able to coherently fend off such probes and exploitations.
Point well made.
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