Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Meanwhile, Just Up the Road In Mooresville, NC...

...the coach of the Mooresville High School football team has been ordered to stop baptizing his players.

Not that they probably don't need it, but it does violate the Constitution.
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2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Sigh... I'm NOT going there...

2/04/2014 12:31:00 PM
Spikessib said...

Yeah, yeah, I know this has all been settled for a long time...but the First Amendment actually says;
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"

The phrase "separation of church and state was used by Jefferson in an 1802 letter to Danbury Baptists;
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

This was an effort to reassure them that they would remain free to worship as they wished. But you'll notice that nowhere in either document does it state religion must be kept out of the public arena. Jefferson himself declared several "Days of Prayer", etc, as a public officer.

In law they rarely look back at a decision to see if it was correct, they merely use it as precedent to help in deciding the next case, however;

...in the case of Wallace v. Jaffree, Justice William Rehnquist offered the decision of the United States Supreme Court:

“It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of Constitutional history….The establishment clause had been expressly freighted with Jefferson’s misleading metaphor for nearly forty years....

There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build a wall of separation [between church and state]….The recent court decisions are in no way based on either the language or intent of the framers.”

Of course, his was the dissenting opinion and thus disregarded.

Sorry to be so long, but I have recently become interested in this decison and the ones based on it. I think there was some cognitive dissonance on the part of the original deciding judge.

2/07/2014 01:41:00 AM

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