Right. “Establishing” a religion involves the government either:
Giving public funding to a religious group for the purposes of assisting that group in furthering its cause. This doesn’t mean paying a religious group fair fees or purchase prices for services or products or land bought or rented.
Requiring citizens to attend services at, profess faith in, perform rituals related to, or fund a specific religion with specific penalties applied for refusal. E.g. “Get baptized in the Church of the New America, Reformation of 2012, or you can’t vote. If you won’t attend at all, you get three years in prison. You are expected to tithe at least $50 a week to the Church, penalties are applied after six months in arrears and back tithes and penalties may be enforced by seizure of property by the Sheriff.”
Handling cash with a religious slogan isn’t a profession of belief, the performance of a ritual, or attendance at a service.
You can cite case law to validate that? Or, you can cite some historical document that tells the phrase has been intended to mean that?
That’s always the question in such matters. Especially when taking a textualist viewpoint. If you claim that’s a “game”, and it’s not “worthwhile”, then you are free to take your marbles and go home. But that’s certainly not an argument.
I believe in the G-d of Abraham. I thank Him when things go well. I ask for His help and guidance when things go badly. I feel His presence in my daily life.
He has no place on our money or in our government. I want my rights guaranteed by a fair and impartial Constitution. I want the government to take no position as to whether G-d exists. Bricker I like and respect you. But I must agree with others who point out that while this decision is consistent with earlier law, so was Dred Scott.
Right. Consistency in law is generally a good thing. Consistency to the extreme that contradicts reasoned morality is not; it is nothing short of perversity.
But apparently not to minor for some religious groups to have a hissy fit and spent ghod knows how much money combatting this vile evil. Check out the links I provided in post #21, then tell me how minor a deal this is.
But by providing advertising, the US Gov’t is helping to promote religious belief (while not promoting atheist points of view or arguments). Part of many religions, including ones that refer to their deity as “God”, is spreading their faith. Thus the government is acting as an agent of the religion, helping further its cause.
Truly, if it isn’t a big deal and it doesn’t really mean anything, then why is there a problem with removing it? Oh, that’s right: because it is a big deal and because it does really mean something, but somehow the ideals represented by the words are better served by lies so the words can continue to be displayed than they would be served by the truth and their removal from publicly funded media.
I disagree that this is minor. Considering how I would feel if the words were 'In Satan We Trust" or “There is No God”, this is a bad ruling, and a clear violation of the Constitution. [/QUOTE]
That text on currency would also likely be constitutionally allowed and also minor in effect. Putting any of those three phrases on the currency may make people who don’t agree with the statment feel bad or might make them lose arguments with their teachers, but it doesn’t impose any behavior on them or subject them to any disability or penalty. The law doesn’t say that only thrusts can use cash or anything.
I’d be happy enough if we took it off the money. I don’t really think ut should be on there. But there’s a way to do that. Pass a law.
Sure. And guess what: Dred Scott was not a bad decision.
OK. It was a terrible decision for what it represented: that slavery was not in the purview of the federal government to stop. But that was the correct law. The Constitution had no amendment outlawing slavery when Dred Scott was decided, and it had provisions which implicitly accepted slavery: the infamous “three-fifths” clause. (Brief digression: modern ears think it was terrible that blacks were ‘only’ counted as three-fifths of a person, when it was actually the Southern states that wanted to count them as a whole person; the enumeration was to determine how many seats each state got in Congress, and more people meant more political power for the South. The North wanted blacks to count as zero, since they could not vote and served only to inflate the South’s influence in Congress).
What ended slavery (apart from the case of Grant v. Lee) was not the courts, but the legislature’s adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment and Congress’ adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
And that’s as it should be. As a nation that vests sovereign power in the people, and a nation in which the people exercise that power through their elected legislature, the courts are NOT the right venue to enact change like the elimination of slavery, as desirable a goal as that was. For it to have had lasting effect and meaning, We, The People, needed to reject slavery. And we did.
No. An unjust law is no law. While I agree that for most things the courts are not the appropriate venue - some things are so abhorrent they should be rejected in EVERY venue. That would be through the legislature, the justice system, and taking up arms with any who would support them to defeat that evil. The slave ought not wait for the slow march of the legislature for redress.
This has the problem of interpretation in that groups will feel their cause too, is just. So be it - history will decide. “In God we Trust…” Not as severe. Slavery - bullshit people should wait for the legislature.
You make it so easy to gloss over slavery’s legacy of segregation and separate but equal, which continued past the Civil War and was reinforced by Plessy 50 years later. Plessy was not legislative action and Brown was a court reversal. Consider the misery the court perpetuated for 100 years in the holy name of stare decisis, which you hold in such reverence.
Bricker’s post wasn’t about stare decisis. And Plessey was wrongly decided. At best it represented the ignorance of the times. At worst it was simple racism.