Not at all. The books were supplied to individuals for their personal use as (one of the few) concessions to their beliefs as we deprived them of their other rights. Had any of the persons swept up in Afghanistan been Christian, I would guess they’d have been allowed a Bible rather than the Qur’an. By the same token, providing a Bible or Qur’an or the Vedas to a person in the U.S. military is simply providing them a service as part of their compensation for their duties. (Enacting a rule that said only Bibles could be distributed to military personnel or that all military personnel had to include a Bible in their kit would be violations, since it would be an act of the government favoring one set of beliefs over another or of imposing one set of beliefs on those who did not share them.)
It would be interesting then to find out if the US army ever hand out bibles or the Vedas to prisoners of war. I would think that if the army handed out bibles as well as korans to these prisoners that you might find thed 1st amendment cited quite often.
Why? Opposing the practice or defending it? If the Army was criticized for handing out bibles to Muslims, it would not be on First Amendment grounds. (With Guantanamo, there is the additional problem that the government specifically chose that location to create the legal fiction that U.S. laws did not apply, so we have to wade through that mess before we even get to the issue of Constitutional protections.)
I suspect that there is a certain amount of confusion as to just exactly what the Separation of Church and State principle actually entails. (This has not been made more clear by various court decisions that wandered in and out of different areas with different conclusion over the last 216 years.) For example, despite cries from some folks that “prayer” and “the bible” have been “eliminated” from schools the in the U.S., the Supreme Court has never made any such ruling. Most of the students who have been reprimanded have been punished by school administrators who did not understand SoCaS and most of those reprimands have been ordered reversed by the courts. The Court has actually stated that a student may read his or her own bible in school as long as it is done during a period of personal time and not assigned as a class project. (The ACLU actually argued this case for at least one student.) Confusingly, the Court also ruled that a child who, when asked to bring in a book from home to read to the class, brought in a “children’s bible stories” book and read from it was out of line, despite the fact that the teacher did not make the selection.
Most bibles handed to POWs in the past would have been issued by the Red Cross–but in the early days of the Guantanamo experience, the U.S. was not granting the Red Cross admission to the place, so the gesture of handing them out fell to the U.S. government by default.
In any event, making a book available to a person who already holds the beliefs expressed in the book is not quite the same as compelling a person to attend worship services for a faith that the person does not share. The point of issuing any book would be to simply make available to a prisoner a book that would give the prisoner comfort, not to impose a particular religion. Ordering the prisoners to read from a religious book, (their own or another) would be an imposition of religion. Making a book that they desire available does not have the same effect.
And issuing bibles in place of the Qur’an to Muslim captives would (aside from being incredibly stupid) be less an issue of the First Amendment as of abusive treatment of prisoners, providing a book they reject in place of a book they desire.
Maybe nothing, at the Federal level. But some (many? most? all?) states have, within their own state constitutions, guarantees of freedoms (such as religious freedom) analogous to those found in the U.S. Bill of Rights. For example, the Illinois state constitution (chosen only because that’s the state I happen to live in) starts with a Bill of Rights that includes the following section:
The OP does raise a good point. People don’t always seem to realize that the U.S. Bill of Rights merely prevents the U.S. Government from abridging people’s rights; it doesn’t guarantee that no one anywhere at any level can limit those rights.
Is there any reason to expect that prisoners, even in a federal prison, would lose their 1st amendment rights? Besides the “esatblishment” clause, there’s also the clause about free exercise of religion. The gov’t isn’t requiring prisoners to have Korans or Bibles, but simply making them available.
Yes. During the colonial period, nine colonies had state-established churches–Puritan (Congregational) in NH, CT, and MA; and Anglican in NY and five Southern colonies.
After independence, the states with Anglican churches quickly disestablished them for obvious reasons. The three New England states, however, maintained their state-supported Congregational churches for several decades.
Absolutely not. Nobody even thought to challenge it, since the First Amendment so explicitly applies only to Congress. States routinely did things which would have violated the First Amendment (if it applied to states) in the Nineteenth Century, such as forbidding anti-slavery agitation and requiring religious tests for public office.
It died out on its own. New Hampshire disestablished in 1817, Connecticut in 1818, and Massachusetts in 1833.
Something I think we can all agree on: there are rights which are not guaranteed by explicit listing in the Constitution. They can be recognized by state constitutions, federal or state statute law, even regulations. Courts should give deference to such definitions, and the Fourteenth Amendment strongly implies, if not overtly states, that a right guaranteed as against the Federal government may not be infringed upon by a state or local government.
Whether the various things inferred by the Warren and Burger Courts and to some extent by the Rehnquist Court are in fact constitutionally guaranteed rights is something that can be debated at length. They are in fact rights which can be asserted, but whether a government may infringe them without acting unconstitutionally is subject to dispute.
Is there a one-word adverb that means “as intended by its drafters”?