Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech …
~ Bill of Rights, First Amendment (1789)
The Christian has no rights that liberals and Democrats are bound to respect.
~ Ellis Washington, a paraphrase of Justice Taney’s Dred Scott opinion
If it has been 61 years, it has been a day – 61 years since the Supreme Court of the United States enshrined into constitutional law and into society the judge-created doctrine “separation of church and state” in the landmark case McCollum v. Board of Education (1948). American law, politics, culture and society haven’t been the same since.
In my humble opinion, the McCollum case is so diabolical and so sophistic an opinion that it rivals the notorious Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, which upheld the continued slavery of my people. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously held in that case: The Negro has no rights that the white man is bound to respect.
For the six decades since the McCollum decision, the wickedness and arrogance of the Dred Scott opinion has been exemplified in the continued legacy of Supreme Court cases that hate, not black people in these cases but America’s rich Judeo-Christian traditions of intellectual thought:
- Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947) was the leading Supreme Court case in the United States in regards to Establishment Clause law. Furthermore this case was one of the earliest examples of the judge-created incorporation doctrine (applying it to the States through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment).
- Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet (1994), the majority of the court joined Justice David Souter’s opinion, which stated that “government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion.”
- In 2001, Roy Moore, formerly the chief justice of Alabama, installed a monument of the Ten Commandments in the state judicial building. In 2003, in the case of Glassroth v. Moore he was ordered by a federal judge to remove the monument, but he refused to comply, ultimately leading to his removal from office. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the lower court’s decision to stand.
Humanists, atheists, socialists and liberals’ war against America’s Judeo-Christian traditions began in earnest in the late 1940s and can be summarized with a paraphrase of Justice Taney’s sentiments against black Americans and slaves – The Christian has no rights that liberals and Democrats are bound to respect … until today.
Just when I thought that the Supreme Court was irredeemably broken, we have come full circle from the anti-Christian cases, Everson and McCollum in the 1940s. As a matter of fact, SCOTUS on Wednesday handed down a rare unanimous 9-0 decision in favor of Christian organizations having the First Amendment freedom of speech right to place a religious monument like the Ten Commandments on public or private property.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the Court in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, saying that such a monument, whether government-financed or privately donated, must be considered “government speech,” conveying a message that it wishes to get out about “esthetics, history and local culture.” (Note that this case was not decided on freedom of religion grounds.)
On the Court’s blog, www.scotusblog.com, a summary of the case reads as follows:
The ruling turned solely on the Constitution’s Free Speech Clause. A religious sect, the Summum, contended that its free speech rights were violated when the city of Pleasant Grove City, Utah, accepted a Ten Commandments monument in its public park but refused to accept a monument displaying tenets of the Summum faith. The “Seven Aphorisms” of that faith represent what believers view as the contents of the original tablets handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Justice Alito’s opinion noted that, when acceptance of a Ten Commandments or other religious monument is treated as conveying the message of the government, the free speech clause does not apply, since that clause only restricts government regulation of private speech. Even if the government speaks through a display provided by some private person or group, the opinion added, that does not take away from its character as government speech.
Alito added that the government, however, is not free to utter a message that violates the Constitution’s ban on official “establishment” of religion. That, however, was not at issue in the Summum case at this point.
Despite the 9-0 ruling, it should be noted that “four justices filed concurring opinions, representing the views of six justices, thus requiring their views to be taken into account in determining just when governments may put up such monuments on public property.” Despite the Court’s disunity, nevertheless, I am elated that after 61 years, multiple social movements and moral revolutions later, the Court got a case right protecting free speech.
Yet, rather than a unified judicial theory of freedom of speech, the Court had to have five different opinions out of nine justices regarding one “unanimous” opinion. Yes, on one level I believe that the Court got one right by allowing a Ten Commandments monument erected on state property without a blasphemous anti-Ten Commandments monument from some cult next to it. Yet, on another level, if “We the People” are the creators of the state, the courts, the government, the republic, the Constitution, then why should we have to beg the Court to defend freedom of religion allegedly protected by the Bill of Rights? Ipso facto – the thing speaks for itself!
In conclusion, if a Christian who was a sitting chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court like Roy Moore, a man of impeccable character, can be impeached for placing a Christian monument on state property, now that SCOTUS has called this act constitutional, can Judge Moore be reinstated on the bench? On second thought, perhaps our freedoms are not that free after all.
