Damocles said:
Sigh said:
Really? Cite the Article and clause.
Isn't it in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment?
Fraid not. It isn't anywhere in the Constitution. It's made-up out of whole cloth. Pure fantasy.
It relies on a letter from Thomas Jefferson to some Baptists, written
after the adoption, and
after initial interpretation by the boot-strapping SCOTUS. The only thing the establishment clause forbids is the establishment (erection) of a national "church", that is, the first amendment is directed at CONGRESS, not the several states, it is a FEDERAL prohibition. To see how it was
understood one must observe the
behaviour of SCOTUS
and the states
and Congress in the first few decades after the adoption.
The current use of the establishment clause as a tool to prohibit all interaction between government and
religion at all levels (thanks to the suprious doctrine of incorporation where the firewalls directed toward congressional action are turned against the states themselves) of government is a study in positivist-legal sophistry and the centralizing, imperial tendancy inherent in man. Other classics are the "right to privacy" and the black hole that is the commerce clause which have swallowed up just about everything by the
will of a few men (in all areas of politics, law and economics) because
they will it to be so.
The establishment clause was first emptied of its public meaning, before being filled-up with an private one. Yet the text remains the same. A fine study indeed in why WRITTEN constitutions are not what they are cracked-up to be. The problem is, when one wants to change the law, one is supposed to change the law...EXPLICITLY, i.e. by the amendment process...open, transparent etc. That is the way it was meant to be done. Rather, thanks to the Supreme Court deciding by itself it is the sole and final arbiter of the meaning of the supreme law, the people now have secret law and personal opinions masquerading as public law, that is, operating "under colour of law".
Marbury v Madison is first-semester law school stuff and a fine example of a metastasizing judicial coup-d'etat as has ever been seen.
There is ever a move to strip the supreme court of it's appelate jurisdiction and limit it explicitly to its orginal jurisdiction. That would help.
The bottom line is this: if a school board in up-state New York want to use textbooks that revere Richard Dawkins as the saviour of man whilst simultaneously attacking all belief in super-nature, that is between the school board, local electors, and the Constitution of the State of New York. It is nothing to do with anyone else. Similarly, if a school board in the upper peninsula of Michigan wants to use text-books that use Augustine and Aquinas as base-lines, that is of no concern to a rigorous atheist in San Diego for whom the Constitution of Michigan is as relevant as the contents of my wife's panties. That is the way it is supposed to be and was meant to be. Live and let live, with a minimum uniformity at the federal level and almost all federal law actually directed AT the federal government telling it what IT cannot do.
