Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner opinion, June 27, 2005
It is another disturbing trend I am witnessing in this current administration, and one that smacks of an ignorant and self-serving agenda continuing to demonstrate a contempt for the Constitution and it’s attendant Bill of Rights. There are those who will rightly argue that the phrase “separation of church and state” appear nowhere in any document. However, those who propound a reverance for traditional values cannot ignore the thinking of those who made these documents possible.
“For example, in an 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson, then president, declared that the American people through the First Amendment had erected a ‘wall of separation between church and state.’... James Madison, considered to be the Father of the Constitution, said in an 1819 letter, ‘The number, the industry and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church and state.’ In an earlier, undated essay (probably early 1800s), Madison wrote, ‘Strongly guarded...is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States.’ ...The principle was articulated by Roger Williams, founder of the settlement in Rhode Island, in the 1600s. The framers of the US Constitution adopted the principle. It has been upheld by every Supreme Court since 1879 - that is until the year 2002 when the court approved school vouchers. ...As eminent church-state scholar Leo Pfeffer notes in his book, Church, State and Freedom, "It is true, of course, that the phrase 'separation of church and state' does not appear in the Constitution. But it was inevitable that some convenient term should come into existence to verbalize a principle so clearly and widely held by the American people....[T]he right to a fair trial is generally accepted to be a constitutional principle; yet the term 'fair trial' is not found in the Constitution. To bring the point even closer home, who would deny that 'religious liberty' is a constitutional principle? Yet that phrase too is not in the Constitution.” (source:Theocracywatch.org)
It is interesting to note that the current Vice President sponsored a bill in 2004, which in essence proclaimed that Christianity and the Bible transcends the political order and cannot be subordinated to the political order. From the New York Times: “Since the Supreme Court decision Marbury v. Madison in 1803, it has been clearly established that the courts have the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution. But right-wing ideologues, unhappy with some of the courts' rulings, have begun to question this principle as part of a broader war on the federal judiciary. The amendment that passed this week reflected an effort to use Congress's power to stop the courts from standing up for the First Amendment and other constitutional principles.” (New York Times, June 18, 2005)
This has much broader implications for policy than deciding if a manger scene should be sponsored by a city govenment at Christmas, as the above article stipulates “other constitutional principles.” Those other principles can be easily seen in the 14th Amendment, specifically the equal protection clause. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction “the equal protection of the laws.” It will do no good in this case to stipulate that each state must be unhindered in it’s freedom to exercise prerogatives not reserved to the Federal Government, because 75% of the states were needed to ratify that amendment, that is to say, 75% of the states agreed to the letter of that amendment. Those broader implications serve as justification for essentially denying civil rights to individuals based on narrow interpretations of Biblical text, and Kim Davis immediately comes to mind.
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