From the aforementioned Wikipedia page on the House Chaplain:
*Shortly after Congress first convened in April 1789 in New York City, one of its “first orders of business” was to convene a committee to recommend a Chaplain,[23] eventually selecting the Reverend William Linn as the first Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives.[24] *
This would be the same Congress which drafted and passed the First 10 Amendments to the US Constitution which also included the Establishment Clause.
So, what you’d have us believe is that the Congress decided to assign a chaplain and then not long after write an Amendment to the Constitution which stated that doing such a practice was against the Constitution. All the while continuing to have a chaplain. Because they thought theocracy rocks and wanted to ‘fuck the constitution’ that they were writing?
*The priest’s defenders have argued that the chaplain can be fired only by a vote of the full House, suggesting his term could last through the end of the year.
“You may wish to outright fire me, if you have the authority to do so, but should you wish to terminate my services, it will be without my offer of resignation,” Conroy wrote.*
Your lack of a decent computer system or phone isn’t my problem, guy. But it is the unresignation letter which stated the reason why Paul Ryan wanted him gone is to get a non-Catholic in the position.
You’d almost think that modern people aren’t the only people who think that their religion is exempt from the establishment clause.
Well, that or the interpretation of the constitution has gradually changed over time such that the establishment clause, one just annoyance over the Church of England, is now interpreted as protecting atheists. But that’s crazy talk.
It seems that the reason the chaplain was forced to resign by Ryan was that in November when Congress was debating the tax measures, he urged them in his morning prayer “to guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”
No winners or losers?
Benefits shared by all Americans?
It may be of no great relevance, but it is often said of the chaplain of the Westminster House of Commons that, at the opening of every sitting, he or she looks at the assembled MPs and prays for the country.
We had some other pretty interesting “traditions”, the most heinous of which were justified by the very same religion represented by the chaplain in question, when the constitution was written. We eventually got rid of them, despite the bloofy protestations of some of the more devout Christians in the land.
There are zero good reasons for The Land of The Free to conscience any deference at all to religion in general, and organized Christianity in particular; especially in light of the deathgrip the evangelical elements of that particular brand of nuttery has on the brains of a huge chunk of our population. I’m not saying religion is bad, but the embodiments of it which desire to influence politics should be rooted out and crushed.
You mean the Catholic chaplain? I doubt Catholics were strong enough to influence the constitution, and were rather the target of rabid anti-Papism themselves, even if that does not rise to the heinousness of the peculiar institution.
I have no use for chaplains myself, I just needed to chime in with a “very same religion” nitpick.
Generally speaking, the interpretation of the Constitution gradually changes due to modern things that the writers couldn’t have foreseen. It would not apply to a Congressional Chaplain, which is not only something they did foresee, but utilize. And regardless of whether or not they believed their religion was exempt from the establishment clause, they indicated that that is how they viewed the establishment clause that they themselves wrote.
I don’t think there you can find a clearer cut case of legislative intent. Though, of course, you could be one of those folks who is a textualist (a la Hugo Black or Antonin Scalia), and that’s a perfectly fine way of Constitutional interpretation, but those whose interpretive gloss includes legislative intent aren’t really “fuck the constitution” types.
The chaplain hasn’t changed. Our interpretation of the establishment clause has.
We didn’t move the goalpost, we moved the field under it.
Though it’s pretty clear that by any plain read, the chaplain was at least a mild flouting of the establishment clause from the get-go. I think a fairly plausible and reasonably fair assumption would be that, as the chaplain predated the clause, his position was ‘grandfathered in’ - it didn’t seem like the sort of oppression they were trying to prevent, and didn’t impact or limit the populace at large, so they didn’t worry about it. Seems like a reasonable guess to me, anyway.
De minimis non curat lex: “The law does not concern itself with trifles” [Ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis offendar,] maculis quas aut incuria fudit, aut humana parum cavit natura: “when many beauties appear in a work, I will not cavil at a few faults that proceed either from negligence or from the imperfection of our nature” (source)
To be fair, Madison wrote that in 1817 and the Detached Memoranda is in warning of the precedents that are being established in regards to religion and wanting to nip those precedents in the bud. In the excerpted part claiming chaplaincies are merely trifle and thus should not be precedent setting behavior.
Interesting he also makes the case, though I’m not sure if he meant it, that not all rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights are absolute, nor should they be applied strictly.