The U.S. Supreme Court has become a constitutional anomaly,
possessing elements of both the legislative and judicial branches of
government. This is hardly surprising, given that it now relies on
precedent more than the U.S. Constitution for its rulings. Thus, like
building on a bad foundation, bad precedent gone uncorrected has
endangered the entire edifice of our modern nation.
Nowhere has the Court gone more wrong than in the area of religious
liberty. Anyone seeking clear guidance in this area need only look to
the conditions prevailing during the birth and early life of our nation.
Those who came here fled a sectarian, state-run church that imposed
beliefs they could not in good conscience accept. The pilgrims were
Christians who fled another Christian church.
The second area of guidance is that those who wrote the First
Amendment, and indeed the Constitution itself, considered themselves
Christian, with a smattering of Deists. Anyone who cares to can
determine this from reading the prayers they prayed later in Congress,
and noting that same Congress even appropriated money to print Bibles
when there was a shortage.
The Court was not always blind to this evidence. It was Chief Justice
Warren Berger who in 1983 delivered the Court’s opinion about paid
congressional chaplains: “It can hardly be thought that in the same week
the members of the first Congress voted to appoint and pay a chaplain
for each House and also voted to approve the draft of the First
Amendment … (that) they intended to forbid what they had just declared
acceptable.”
Therefore, what is evident is that America’s founders did not want a
state-run church to be established. Rather, they wanted a variety of
Christian churches to operate freely in the land, with one not being
favored over the other. And this the churches did freely for many years,
even running schools and founding our major centers of higher education,
such as Princeton and Yale. Thus the infamous “wall of separation” that
Thomas Jefferson wrote about in a campaign letter to the Danbury
Baptists, who were fearful that some other denomination would be favored
to become a state-run church, never indicated that the government of the
United States was to be hostile to religion. Yet this piece of parchment
is now the Court’s only fig leaf of dignity covering its hostility
toward people of all religious faiths.
Indeed, I know of no one in America who has ever proposed the idea of
a state-run church. Such an institution typically requires membership of
all citizens, its clergy and maintenance are paid for by taxpayers, and
its dogma is the law of the land. I think most religious people of any
Christian denomination would recoil in horror at such a suggestion.
Why then, the court’s queer fear? What is the Supreme Court
protecting Americans from, in legislating thought and speech to deny
people of faith the public expression that this same court so carefully
reserves for those who urinate on religious values in the name of art
and with the benefit of public funding? As Otto Scott writes in
“Christianity and the Courts,” the court “wants to deny the Church the
right to post the Ten Commandments, as though they are inherently
offensive to consciences too delicate to contemplate. The Court can
hardly equate the mere posting of these ancient mandates as an effort to
create a new National Church, since they were attributed, thousands of
years ago, to Moses, a non-Christian” (Otto Scott’s Compass, 1 July
2000).
This wholesale butchering of the Constitution is perhaps all that we
can expect from a court which chose to deny equal protection to an
infant whose head is crushed by an abortion doctor’s forceps on its way
out of the birth canal. It is the same protection that we have against
being tried twice for the same offense, when with a wink and a nod the
court allows newspeak prosecutors to call the same crime by different
names, and continue prosecuting the defendant until the jury reaches the
politically-correct decision.
Oppression of the majority always begins with a minority. Do not
imagine that a court which has twisted the Constitution into a shredded
fig leaf in one area can be counted upon to preserve its integrity in
another. If justice is to become yet one more public lottery, we may as
well do away with the charade and the false hope it generates. Congress,
of course, has yet to deal with the fiction of lifetime appointments for
Supreme Court justices. But their record on impeachment is not very
promising.
Like domestic animals, our Congress members seem content to graze the
public fields provided for them by the judicial and executive branches,
and wander faithfully home every two or six years to renew their spot in
the herd.
Meanwhile, the underpinnings of the nation’s freedoms erode, its
liberties preserved or discarded at the whim of Justice robed in black.
Or so it would appear — to those for whom faith is nothing but a
fantasy. But if the founders were correct, those who sit on today’s
Supreme Court will yet have opportunity to meet the Supreme Judge of all
the Universe. It is to Him they will answer for their perversion of that
which was entrusted to them, and from whose verdict there truly is no
appeal.