The best intro to this essay submission from Justin Smith
can be summed up from an excerpt:
Any attack against
Christianity and Judaism in America using the fallacy of "separation of
Church and State" is simply an attempt to further undermine, not only Our
U.S. Constitution and Religious Liberty, but Our entire traditional American
way of life. Do not accept the Fallacy.
JRH 8/6/17
***************
The Fallacy of "Separation of Church and State"
By Justin O. Smith
Sent 8/5/2017 3:36 PM
The Founding Fathers believed that government's role in
religion should be limited. We cannot discount that the First Amendment begins
"Congress shall make no law" either establishing a state religion or
prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Rather than articulate an
affirmative responsibility for government to protect religion, the Founding Fathers
felt it was enough to keep the government out. If nothing else, the language of
the First Amendment makes it clear the goal was to restrain government when it
came to religion. There is no suggestion the Founders felt the establishment
clause and the free exercise clause were in any way competing. Otherwise, why
would the Founders include the two clauses together?
The point was to keep government out of both realms. Both
clauses were needed because it was not sufficient to restrain government from
establishing a state religion; government also had to be restrained from any
attempt to interfere with religious practices and beliefs. The negative
language of the First Amendment does not prohibit Congress from passing a law
that promotes religion, provided the judgement does not promote one religion
over others.
Before the bad law and judicial activism that started with the abuse of the Constitution by Justice Hugo Black in Everson v Board of Education (1947), the states were not prohibited under the First Amendment from establishing religion, and nowhere in the debate on freedom of religion in the first Congress is there any mention of "separation of church and state." Our Founders own writings clearly show that they never intended for public officials to check their convictions and beliefs at the door to their offices. They would have been shocked by the Court's excessively broad interpretation of the First Amendment, given the language the Founders crafted with the belief it would protect open expression of religious beliefs in America.
The Founders most certainly would have rebelled against the
idea of an absolute "separation of church and state" and the use of
the First and Fourteenth Amendments to
eradicate all Judeo-Christian references to God from the public square, because
these ideas are incompatible with the Original Intent and unalienable rights
granted to each of us by our Creator, thus making them erroneous and
historically unsupportable.
[Blog Editor: Here’s an interesting thought on how the
Left and Activist Judges misused the 14th Amendment to rob the
Original Intent of the First Amendment:
When did things change?
Charles Darwin theory’s that
species could evolve inspired a political theorist named Herbert Spencer to
suggest that laws could evolve. This influenced Harvard Law Dean Christopher
Columbus Langdell to develop the “case precedent” method of practicing law,
which influenced his student, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
This occurred near the same time
the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, introduced by Republicans in Congress to
guarantee rights to freed slaves in the Democrat South. The evolutionary
“case-precedent” method provided a way to side-step the Constitutional means of
changing the Constitution through the Amendment process.
Activist Justices began to
creatively use the 14th Amendment to take jurisdiction away from the states
over issues such as unions, strikes, railroads, farming, polygamy, freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly.
Freedom of religion was still
under each individual state’s jurisdiction until Franklin D. Roosevelt.
…
In 1937, FDR nominated Justice
Hugo Black to the Supreme Court, who also concentrated power by writing
decisions taking jurisdiction away from the states in the area of religion. He
did this by simply inserting the phrase “Neither a state” in his 1947 Everson v
Board of Education decision: “The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the
First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the federal government
can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all
religions or prefer one religion over another.” READ ENTIRE ARTICLE (THIS
IS HOW ATHEISM BECAME OUR OFFICIAL 'RELIGION'; By BILL
FEDERER; WND; 1/15/16 9:01 PM)
Now I can’t vouch for this being Justin Smith’s thought
on the 14th Amendment, but using the effect of Darwinism in the
development of Case Law to have more authority than Original Intent is
enlightening to me.]
On New Year's Day 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists to assuage their fear that the federal government might one day attempt to condition religious freedom as a right granted by the state. Jefferson, an anti-Federalist [Blog Editor: Federalist/Anti-Federalist Perspectives – HERE, HERE & HERE], clearly stated his intention to keep government out of religious affairs rather than empower it to remove religion from the public arena: "Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in the behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural rights in opposition to his social duties."
The First Amendment compels government not to eradicate religion from the public arena. If the expression of religious beliefs is an inherent God-designed part of human nature, as the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, then government acting to remove religion from the public sphere would have seemed to Our Founding Fathers to be acting in a manner antithetical to Our Founding Principles.
It is almost as if Justice Black decided the First Amendment was equivalent to the biblical admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, under the assumption that a discernible distinction could be made without conflict between what was Caesar's and what was God's. The whole point of the First Amendment's attempt to protect freedom of religion is that over time Caesar tends to intrude upon God.
In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in McCollom v Board of Education,
333 U.S. 203 (1948) that religious education provided by churches on public
school grounds in Illinois during the school day was unconstitutional. Then in
1952, in Zorach v Clauson, 343 U.S.
306 (1952), the Supreme Court found that allowing New York students to leave
school grounds for religious education was constitutional. Dissenting in
Zorach, Justice Black wrote, "I see no significant difference between the
invalid Illinois system and that of New York here sustained." If Justice
Black, the author of the court's majority opinion in Everson, could not
distinguish these cases, how could state, county, city or municipal school
officials be expected to make the distinction reliably?
A Godless public square could not be more antithetical to
what Our Founding Fathers thought they were achieving when drafting the First
Amendment, and the Courts distort precedent whenever they use the Establishment
Clause to crush all things religious Ironically, the very language crafted to
protect religious freedom has now reached the point at which Americans can only
be assured freedom from religion in all places within this nation, with the
possible exceptions of prayer confined to church and free expression of
religion confined to the privacy of one's home.
Jefferson made a poignant remark in Notes on the State of Virginia, which clarifies his thinking: "And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have lost the only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?" [Blog Editor’s Emphasis]
Why didn't the Supreme Court choose this text for their
ruling? [Blog Editor’s Emphasis] Or his use of "natural
rights" in other documents? Justice Clarence Thomas once stated: "... this
Court's nebulous Establishment Clause analyses, turn on little more than
“judicial predilections ... It should be noted that the extent to which
traditional Judeo-Christian religion is removed from the public square and the
public schools, it is replaced by other religions, including Secular Humanism,
which is specifically recognized as a religion by the Supreme Court."
In order to combat this assault on religious freedom and
religious liberty, to date, twenty-one states have enacted Religious
Freedom Restoration Acts since 1993. Currently, ten states [5/4/17 – 9 States] are
considering legislation on the topic this year, according to the National
Conference of State Legislatures. Virginia amended their state RFRA, but
otherwise no states have passed their legislation.
For eight decades, the ACLU has been America's leading religious censor,
waging a largely uncontested war, until recently, against America's core
values, utilizing every fallacy, piece of misinformation and outright LIE
imaginable in its war against religious liberty, with the support of much of
the current Marxist media; both are intent
on destroying traditional America, including the nuclear family. We now live in
a country where our traditional Christian and Jewish faith and religion ---
civilizing forces in any society --- are openly mocked and increasingly pushed
to the margins, and our weapon to stop them is the Founding Fathers' own words
and their Original Intent regarding the U.S. Constitution.
Ultimately, two very diverse thinkers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams concluded, that without virtue based on a solid
belief in God, Liberty was inevitably lost. In other words, if the Supreme
Court, through the efforts of Communists, atheists and fools and ACLU
prompting, succeeds in removing the Judeo-Christian God from American public
life, a foundation pillar upon which American liberty has depended will have
been removed, perhaps irretrievably. Without the open expression of religious
freedom so fundamental to American liberty that it is written into the First
Amendment of the Bill of Rights, American Liberty will not long persist.
Americans cannot and must not allow the Communists and
atheists of this nation and the ACLU to secularize America to the point where
our tolerance is turned into silencing and punishing religious speech. Life is
valuable; marriage is a God-ordained institution between one man and one woman,
and families are comprised of a male father and a female mother with any number
of children. Any attack against Christianity and Judaism in America using the
fallacy of "separation of Church and State" is simply an attempt to
further undermine, not only Our U.S. Constitution and Religious Liberty, but
Our entire traditional American way of life. Do not accept the Fallacy.
By Justin O. Smith
__________________
Edited by John R. Houk
All links and any text embraced by brackets are by the Editor.
© Justin O. Smith
