New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | July 5, 2005

Do Ten Commandments displays on public land offend the principle of state religious neutrality, or are they acceptable as recognitions of our religiously freighted history and traditions? Cathy Young says: Yes.

Comments

|7.5.05 @ 12:46PM|#

good article, Cathy. I think you hit the nail on the head.

I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend a book: The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness by Kramnick and Moore. it's a good primer to the issue of religion and the constitution.

there's another book due out soon: The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State by Kramnick. obviously, I don't know if this one's any good yet.

|7.5.05 @ 2:40PM|#

The First Amendment does not guarantee freedom from religion and Supreme Court attempts to say otherwise have resulted in convoluted and contradictory opinions that could only be ginned up by legal intellectuals. Here's a simple test: If there's a collection, it's an establishment of religion. No collection; it's simply an expression of religion (i.e., the free exercise thereof), concerning which "Congress shall make no law." The fact that our society is more pluralistic and that some citizens may be offended by the religious expression of other citizens is irrelevant. Of course, the First Amendment also guarantees the right of the thin-skinned to exercise freedom of speech via incessant whining.

|7.5.05 @ 2:50PM|#

The "collection" is the tax money spent on it.

|7.5.05 @ 8:21PM|#

David Elstrom blows it with, "The fact that our society is more pluralistic and that some citizens may be offended by the religious expression of other citizens is irrelevant."

The cases had nothing whatsoever to do with the religious expression of citizens. The party engaged in the disallowed religious expression was the government. When the government expresses itself on a religious matter, it is establishing religion, by adopting the beliefs it expresses as official actions by the government.

It is illuminating, however, to see that at least one supporter of the Christian Coalition's position go on the record with his belief that the government exists as an instrument for the advancement of the majority's religious agenda.

|7.6.05 @ 10:59AM|#

Well, I guess we can agree this is an emotional issue. But my point concerns the meaning of the plain words in the First Amendment.

First, let's deal with the idea of "forbidden religious expression". The First Amendment doesn't prohibit this. It prohibits the "establishment of religion." History tells us that our Founders, including those who authored the amendment, had no problem with hiring a chaplain for Congress. It was George Washington who appended the words, "So help me God" onto the Presidential Oath of Office. The list goes on.

If words mean anything then an "establishment" of religion should require something more than a plaque or a stone. In colonial times Virginia allowed the Anglican Church to directly tax citizens (this was the subject of a famous case won by Patrick Henry). This obviously favored one specific belief over others -- thus "establishing" the Anglican Church as the official religion of the Commonwealth. (While the original Constitution did not prohibit states from having an official religion, I would agree that the authors of the 14th Amendment intended it to extend the constraints of the first eight amendments to the states.)

Fast forward to modern times when our masters sitting on various federal courts discern that "establishment of religion" encompasses mere religious expression. Then, for example, the City of Los Angeles is forced to remove a small cross from its seal. The fact that this was purely historical (does anyone deny that Los Angeles was founded by Spanish missionaries) was not given serious consideration. But that's the problem. If the mere presence of the symbol is an establishment of religion, it's clear that the word "establishment" has lost any true meaning. Or, to put it another way, "establishment" means whatever the hypersensitive can convince a judge it means.

My point is simply this. If the plain words of the text are this elastic, then the law means whatever the government wants it to mean as suits its convenience. This is one possible definition of tyranny.

|7.6.05 @ 11:20AM|#

Fast forward to modern times when our masters sitting on various federal courts discern that "establishment of religion" encompasses mere religious expression. Then, for example, the City of Los Angeles is forced to remove a small cross from its seal

Just so we're clear, you do know that the first sentence here has nothing to do with the second sentence, right? That is, the California state chapter of the ACLU raised a stink about the Los Angeles seal, and the city decided to change it to avoid a bigger stink, and no courts of any kind were involved.

|7.6.05 @ 1:14PM|#

Are you suggesting that the City Council was not influenced by the possibility of protracted and expensive litigation before judges with a flexible definition of the word "establishment" and a disposition toward expansive readings of prohibitions they like?

|7.6.05 @ 2:15PM|#

David, if the government is doing the speaking, then it has adopted the content of that speech as its own - ergo, when it engages in religious speech, it has established the principles and beliefs in that speech as those of the government.

The government cannot adopt one set of religous beliefs, and not another, as the Official Religious Beliefs of the United States of America. Your argument is one of minimization - you're right, a plaque might not be a big deal.

But if language means anything (an we all want languange to MEAN SOMETHING, dammit), then the absence of the phrase "except, maybe, a little bit" in the First Amendment should suggest that a de minimus example of establishing a religion, or a set of religious beliefs, is forbidden.

|7.6.05 @ 2:29PM|#

And of course the history of the Kentucky exhibits demonstrates a desire to promote a specific religious text, one which had absolutely no impact on the Constitution itself.

|7.6.05 @ 3:56PM|#

Whereas the symbolic statuary, sans language, in the Texas case does not so promote any religion, but acknowledges a source of law.

The court's taking a lot of guff for splitting hairs on these cases, but I think they got it about right.