No. It’s not. It’s as if Kimstu just returned a volley to the deep third of the court, you wound up, and whiffed completely on it. The ball is sitting against the fence behind you, bouncing slowly, while everyone watching with even the slightest knowledge of the game, is watching you try and convince yourself you just scored a point.
Just to be clear, you acknowledge that the establishment-of-religion measures that I mentioned are constitutionally perfectly permissible once the Establishment Clause is gone, right? If not, what do you think would stop them?
Now, as for the 14th Amendment prohibiting, say, inmate-meals discrimination based on religion: Not seeing it. Prisoners may be treated differently based on their conduct, and if refusing to accept Christ is considered damaging or disruptive conduct (as in a country with an established religion and no specified right to freedom of religion it might well be), then AFAICT it would be completely valid to put pressure on prisoners to change their behavior.
Umm, could you enlighten us on your understanding of the differences between kosher salt and, hehehe, non kosher salt?
Bonus points if you can explain the difference between a kosher and a regular dill pickle!
CMC fnord!
kimstu you are a saint. I don’t know how you have the patience to do this. Watching you debate SlackerInc is like watching that video of the men trying to return a serve from Serena. 
You mean this one?
Why, thank you! I do model my game after Fed’s, but really: you are too kind.
Thumbs up.
Nonsense. If this were so, it could apply right now to any philosophical belief that does not involve the supernatural. Prisoners could be punished with inferior food* for refusing to accept the validity of the Laffer curve, or for advocating reparations for slavery.
And if this is actually a thing (who knows what kind of interesting factoid you may come up with next), then it means we need protection of philosophical beliefs more broadly, not a protection narrowly tailored to religion. Rules about establishment and free exercise of religion qua religion are bullshit.
But any such rule should not require others to give special treatment to those with certain philosophical views. It should be about the free expression of opinions, and secondarily the free exercise of actions and rituals only insofar as anyone else could be allowed to do the same thing for “shits ‘n’ giggles” as you like to say.
I think a new rule is unnecessary, though, because punishing someone for “refusing to accept” something is inherently an impingement on their right to free speech and expression.
Of course, it’s weird that we are even having this debate around prison inmates, who do not have full rights under the First Amendment. They cannot for instance claim a right to “peaceably assemble”.
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*Interesting BTW that you seem now to have implicitly accepted this part of my argument, that regular prisoner meals are in fact of inferior quality compared to kosher or Halal ones. :dubious:
SlackerInc, just to get everyone on the same page, are you in agreement with this previously stated claim, and if not, could you explain why you disagree?
Well, no, because we’ve got a constitutional framework that forbids the government to privilege one set of beliefs over another. But if we’ve got no constitutional Establishment Clause and thus no barrier to a state establishment of religion, then a resulting Christian-theocratic government could well involve privileging a particular set of beliefs over others: that’s kind of what theocratic governments do.
We’re on rather tenuous ground in this discussion because IANAL and NAY, so neither of us has the expert knowledge required to state for certain what this drastically modified hypothetical situation of removing constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion would involve as knock-on effects. However, if you remain unconvinced about the “punishment” scenario, it’s easy to come up with other theocratic justifications for, say, differential treatment of Christian vs. non-Christian prison inmates in such a society.
How about: the breaking of bread among Christians is on some level a sacred rite, the government supports the state’s intrinsic Christian mission in this regard by supplying special “Christian feast” food for the meals of Christian prisoners, any prisoner who accepts Christianity is eligible to participate in these Christian feasts, the rest of you heathens eat whatever we give you? What if anything do you imagine would legally prevent the imposition of such a discriminatory policy on perfectly constitutional religious grounds?
Hmmm. How are you going to articulate that “protection of philosophical beliefs” in such a way as to exclude, say, school boards decreeing the teaching of flat-earthism or “Natural Law” or any other “philosophical belief” that the local community advocates?
I mean, in our current system that’s taken care of (although not without periodic appeals to the courts) because it’s easy to demonstrate that any such dogma, seriously advocated, gets its impetus from being part of a religious belief system. And the Establishment Clause blows the whistle on the government promoting religious belief systems. But take away the Establishment Clause, and what’s your justification then?
Or is that one of the issues on which you propose to “fight prayer and Creationism in schools district by district, and vote with our feet”? AFAICT, absent the Establishment Clause that basically means “lose a lot of legal battles and have to physically retreat to the comparatively small number of jurisdictions where advocates of rigorously rational scientific thought are a demographic majority”. Hurray for freedom. :dubious:
Turns out it’s not quite as easy as you thought to pin down the constitutional framework of “how a government of any modern, advanced country ought to work”, huh? Maybe we need to consult a few 230-year-old men in powdered wigs. (While of course I don’t condone the “Founding Fathers’” obsolete views on race and gender, or hairstyles for that matter, I think they did a hell of a lot better job establishing a charter of basic civil liberties than either you or I are likely to be able to.)
That’s an erroneous interpretation on your part. I don’t actually know anything about the quality of kosher/halal prison fare as opposed to the regular kind, though I’m happy to look at a cite about it if you’ve got one.
My hypothetical example involved a Christian-theocratic government giving a minority group of non-Christian prisoners intentionally inferior meals as a form of (permitted) religious discrimination, but I did not intend that to imply that I think kosher/halal prison meals provided for the minority of observant Jewish or Muslim inmates in our current system are either inferior or superior to the ones provided for the rest of the majority-Christian inmate population.
(Everybody else: 
:o )
You’re saying you play at Federer’s level? Bwahahahaha.
For the amusement of others, here’s the story on men trying to return Serena’s serves.
Here’s the video.
Oh dear. SMH
The guys in that video are clearly not even amateur tennis players. They look like they don’t even know how to hold a racquet properly, and they are just clowning around anyway. To cite that as evidence of anything is pretty sad.
Kimstu, can you cite cases in advanced Western countries without Establishment Clauses where these dire scenarios come to pass? Frankly, I think the American fetishization of “religious freedom” is more a weakness than a strength.
I’m pretty sure that’s the point.
I’ll be happy to address that question, but could you first please answer the one I’ve asked you a couple of times now?
I’d like to hope that democracy stops them. If it doesn’t, I don’t know how robust a document not supported by the population is ultimately going to be, especially in our modern environment where the courts are heavily politicized like everything else.
ETA: Besides which, as I have already said, I believe that other provisions of the First Amendment and 14th Amendment do apply. We need to protect people from being punished for their ideology, regardless of whether it is based in religion.
Well, it would certainly slow them down at, say, the level of complete takeover of the federal government. But without specific constitutional protections for religious freedom, what’s to stop the establishment of theocracy at the local or state level?
Irrespective of the Constitution’s imperfections, though, it does provide a mechanism through the First Amendment whereby people can’t use the government to force their own religion on other people, and can’t deny other people the right to practice their religion, outside of certain narrowly defined limits. People always continue trying to violate those constitutional restrictions, of course, but the courts obeying a clear mandate to protect religious freedom keep stopping them.
You’ve provided absolutely nothing in the way of evidence or plausible arguments to suggest that there would be less abuse of freedom of religion in a state which did not explicitly protect that freedom than in one that does.
How do those other provisions prevent the establishment of a religion by the government, whether at the federal, state or local level, in the absence of constitutional prohibitions against it?
I already asked you how you would distinguish that kind of protection from, say, school boards attempting to embed anti-scientific “ideology” in a curriculum, and I don’t believe you’ve answered the question.
Your determination to have a “purified” Constitution that doesn’t even mention religion is leading you to propose a disastrously ill-thought-out system with huge opportunities for oppression. I think you’d look back from such a system on your own folly in discarding explicit protections for freedom of religion because you were miffed that religiously observant prison inmates got special kosher/halal meals when other inmates didn’t, and kick yourself quite hard for it.
There would be absolutely nothing to stop enacting a theocracy if that provision were removed from the constitution. Hell, it’s an ongoing fight to keep a certain party from establishing such a theocracy with the provision still in the constitution!
I don’t fundamentally think religion deserves this level of recognition. To me, it is nothing more than “a weird and nonsensical thing people believe in”. A throwback to primitive times when we didn’t have scientific inquiry and the priesthood maintained social control. We need to get past literally being reverent of such antiquated poppycock.
First off, your view of religion is not very nuanced and it is, to be blunt, quite ill-informed if not actually misinformed. Not all religions posit a deity.
Next, if you actually feel strongly about something which is in our constitution, you can agitate to have it removed.
But wouldn’t that mean you would be advocating for not following the basic law of the country as it is now?
Too lazy to look but I have a gut feeling that if the conversation was Christianity & Guns you’d be singing a completely different tune.
Huh?