Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Note that despite the fact that the tem “separation of church and state” is often used in association with first amendment that it does not appear any ware within it. The phase is a actually based on a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a Baptist church addressing their concerns of about the possibility of a state religion being established in the U.S. like the Church of England in Britain
There are those that want to eliminate all public religious observances and references. They try to use the establishment clause to achieve their goal.
The clause in question called says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. What is meant by this is that there is to be no legally established official religion of the United States like the Church of England in Britain. In essence the idea is that the United States
However these people are not trying to force government neutrality on religion but hostility. This rakes many forms but they include many violations of the free exercise clause which immediately follows the establishment clause and states “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” referring to religion. Include a public high school valedictorian being threatened with jail by a judge if she mentioned God or prayed in her speech. This also violates the next clause in the 1St Amendment which states “or abridging the freedom of speech”
What these people are actually trying to do is legally (by judges) establish the atheistic religion of Secular Humanism as the official state religion because if you ban references to God and religions observances from public functions in you are declaring the official government religion to be Atheistic Secular Humanism.
No comments:
Post a Comment