Please note tha the first quotation in Kimstu’s Post #460 should be attributed to magellan01 (from Post #455), not to tomndebb.
What’s really bizarre about this Pitified “debate” is that it’s the right-wingers who are always pissing and moaning about “originalism” and “textualism” and sneering at Griswold v. Connecticut’s (in)famous “penumbras” and “emanations”. Yet here we have the right-wingers making an argument which relies on a distant mirage of a funhouse-mirror reflection of the shadow of the actual Constitutional text.
As I noted earlier in the thread, this is not about the supposedly opaque language of the First Amendment’s allegedly angst-ridden, tortured, eternally conflicted religion provisions (“establishment” and “free exercise”). This is about the perfectly clear and straight-forward provision that:
From this, people like Prager and magellan01 somehow, by consulting the sprits of the Founding Fathers via Ouija board and subjecting the English language to a good vigorous waterboarding, conclude that the people who wrote the above passage (of course!) wanted to subject all office-holders to a religious test. :smack:
Black is white! Night is day! Two plus two equal five!
It’s a wonder these people ever manage to cross the street without getting run over by a truck.
Please, please stop trying to confuse the issue with the facts.
I’m sorry if this question has been answered, but I really don’t want to go through ten pages of thread. While there’s never been any Muslim congressmen before, there have been Jewish ones. What did they swear on? A Christian bible, or a copy of the Tanakh?
The actual swearing in is done in mass assembly on the floors of the Senate and House with no one placing their hand(s) on any book.
Later, there are photo ops for each of the congresscritters to send back to the various local newspapers. At the photo ops, some Jews have used the Tanakh, others have used (or not used) other books.
Ellison apprently announced his intention to use the Qur’an as a way to tell the folks back home that a good Muslim could be a good citizen/legislator, at which point Prager decided to raise his bogus points while ignoring that both congresscritters and even presidents have a long history of not using the Bible.
Oooooooooopsie, sorry all.
I’m just curious to know whether you would have considered it somehow inappropriate to take it upon yourself to correct the post without bothering to point out the fact of the error.
Off-topic, I know, but probably more interesting than anything Mr. Prager has to say…
“Right-wingers”? What am I, chopped liver? “Right-wingers” aren’t making this argument, there are only two people making this argument, Prager and Magellan01.
Hmm. So, then I agree with you. What Ellison is doing is consistant with custom and tradition, and there’s no problem allowing it.
To be charitable to Prager, though, is it possible that he was just ignorant of that fact? Because, after all, in his article, he does say that Jews and atheists take the oath on the Christian bible. If he had been correct in that (which, obviously, he’s not), his protests against Ellison’s actions make sense. Ellison would be breaking with tradition, and putting his own personal moral sense ahead of the way things have always been done.
Bull pucky.
If a jew or atheist decides to swear a false oath so as to not rock the boat, that simply means they’ve sworn a false oath, not that they’re upholding some grand tradition.
In fact, they’re undermining the real importance of the tradition of the (informal) oath on a holy book. They’re saying ‘my word means no more to me than this book’ instead of ‘my faith in this book is my guarantee that my word is good’.
I debated fixing the quote tag and leaving an “edit” message explaining my actions and taking the route I did. Given that I was part of the discussion, I decided that I did not want anyone later claiming I had made more changes than just the username. Perhaps a bit of paranoia, perhaps prudent. It was certainly not intended to point out (as my continued posting on the topic is doing) one entire typing error (especially by a person who agreed with me on the point in question).
Well, but it’s unlikely that most of the Congressmen who do the photo op do it out of any real sense of religious devotion. Following tradition has a value in itself. It’s the shared traditions and rituals that help keep a society together and create a sense of shared identity and group pride.
What matters is if it’s legal. As there is no requirement for a book and given that the oath-taker has the legal option of affirming, there’s no problem with dancing the two-step while uttering the words.
Fixed.
Paranoia, in my opinion. 
I bolded the wrong part.
That shows that Prager is aware that there were Jews who did not use the Christian Bible for their oath.
Just 'cause I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.
Excepting, of course, those whom the tradition is deliberatly crafted to exclude. I don’t personally get much of a sense of pride or shared identity from swearing on a Bible. Being told that I’m required to swear on a Bible pretty much re-enforces the idea that I’m not a part of the “group” and tells me that I’m not much welcome in it.
Not the smartest policy for a society as heterogenous as ours to follow, I think.
It also shows that some Jews (most?) did use the bible, which was not clear from post #465.
The Bible is clearly an “other book” if the context is “only the Tanakh” and the overall context of who has and has not used the Bible (in conjunction with the fact that the book is only a prop for a photo), pretty clearly demonstrates that Prager is simply lying about what officials have “always” used and that his whole effort is simpy to attack people who are not mindless conformists to promote those who are willing to sacrifice their actual beliefs for the sake of marching in ceremonial lockstep. In other words, Prager prefers hypocrisy to principle ands holds that hypocrisy up as an American ideal.