…not sure how interested others are in this issue, but Annie Laurie Gaylor recently debated Jordan Sekulow (executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice) on FAUX News.
There is an embedded video clip if you scroll down.
This debate finds Ms. Gaylor arguing that Moses is NOT represented at the Supreme Court building, and calling her opponent a bully.
They also apparently used a bad driver’s license photo for her picture.
I can give you a simple common-sense explanation.
The framers came from England which had a state-sponsored church, called “The Church of England”. The crown being the defender of said church. This church still exists.
But we didn’t want the crown. or our own crown, so out with the crown went the idea of a “Chuch of America”.
So no edicts from Washington calling for creation (or establishing) a Church of America.
That’s it.
Worship where you want, or don’t worship at all.
Any gripes about crosses, trees, mennorahs, mosques, are people’s personal peccadilloes and have nothing to do with the Constitution.
“Common sense explanations” don’t ignore 300 years of settled law.
I don’t see those two closely related - that we forbade a state church because we were ditching the concept of a king. Sure, the no-king idea was a product of the enlightenment, and the idea of religious freedom was also a product of the enlightenment, but there wasn’t a path from “no king” to religious freedom.
It was a pretty radical idea at the time, to set up a government that conspicuously didn’t claim to be a franchise of God.
There is not a law against it, there is a constitutional amendment against it.
With that said, the federal government leases quite a bit of commercial space around DC and a lot of them sell religiously themed memorabilia, I don’t think the government needs to restrict their leases to exclude anything religious. The Smithsonian has a lot of artwork and relics that have religious overtones (mostly Christian).
With that said its a bit cheesy to lease the Knights of Coloumbus the footprint of the statue to try to wipe their fingerprints.
Agreed. Same thing here in San Diego with the hilltop cross. Congress permitted the sale of a tiny “postage stamp” of land to a private concern, solely to preserve the cross. The Supreme Court is hearing the issue.
Er… what does a statue of Jesus do, then? What’s the point of it?
And yeah, general agreemen to the whole "Some of the FF thought “men have a right to all this nice shit” actually meant “white landowning men”, so no, I don’ t believe it is across the books important what they thought, and I would rather hope neither do you. I think there’s times where you say “Yes, these were learned men, who were ahead of their time in many ways”, and times when you say “…but, nevertheless, who were products of their time, and whose views should be unashamedly rejected when we deem them surplus to requirements”.
Frankly, an argument should stand on its own merits irregardless of who speaks up for it, anyway.
I see them as pretty closely related. One of the major points, on both issues, is the question of worthiness. The King wasn’t just the King because he was the son of the previous guy, but because he was ordained, selected by God, to rule. His rightfulness to rule was inherently tied up in religion. American democracy as a prototype was about taking the inherent right to rule away from a select few (to an extent), and just as taking away those temporal rights was important so was the spiritual rights.
Rejecting both royals and state religion are tied together in the idea that there was no ruling class except that created by election of the masses (limited in scope as they were).