Grrr, ITR Champion!
Actually, a 10 Commandments display is not automatically violative of the Establishment Clause. Look at the aforementioned display in Van Orden or even in the Supreme Court chambers itself, where there is a depiction on the frieze of Moses receiving the Decalogue from God.
It’s all about context. But clearly a sham excuse wouldn’t be good enough to rescue an otherwise unconstitutional display.
I find it absolutely startling that everyone who has “the solution” to the supposed problem of the interface of church and state apparently has absolutely no clue about the Lemon test.
There are places where church and state can and should conmingle their affairs, and they occur when there is a separate secular reason for something a religious organization proposes to do. In my own experience on the board of an outreach mission organization:
[ul][li]The churches propose to feed the poor. The USDA distributes surplus food to the poor. No reason why the USDA cannot use the existing church mechanisms to handle their distribution. (But notice that it cannot have any religious strings – you cannot require that the poor sit through an evangelistic service to get their food, for example.) [/li][li]The State Education Department is willing to underwrite a grant to the mission to pay for tutors aiding high school dropouts to get their GED. Again no religious overtones are permitted.[/li][li]The State agency charged with non-incarceration correction programs underwrote a program in which somewhat stricter supervision than a typical probation program was provided to young offenders for whom neither probation nor jail was the best sentence. And to my certain experience turned some lives around in the process.[/li][li]Rehabbing of old structures into low-income housing to provide homes for the homeless (or those in crowded or substandard housing). Again no religious test.[/ul][/li]
As former Justice S.D. O’Connor noted, the Jeffersonian “wall” is not the only model for what the Establishment Clause requires. Laws that treat all religions and the absence of religions equally and impartially are quite acceptable. The military chaplain program is one good example. Making available a parcel of land as an outdoor gathering area to all groups, from the Baptists to the Orthodox to the local Wiccan coven to the local chapter of American Atheists, is a quite constitutional move.
For the government to use tax money or public land to erect an icon of one religious tradition without secular purpose is an endorsement of a single religious belief at the expense of all others, and is impermissible. Even if you call it something else.
If you want the government to put up crosses, you better be doing it because you want them to crucify people on them. That’s the secular use for a cross.
Is Lemon still considered to be authoritative? I don’t see how Lemon squares with, say, prayers before sessions of Congress.
IIRC, Congressional prayers have never squared with anything, because nobody wants to deal with them. A majority of Congress is Christian, and I’d bet a majority overall has no problem with the prayers, and I also doubt that a private citizen would have any chance in a suit, so it’s probably not going to change.
:dubious:
The Supreme Court dealt with the issue squarely in Marsh v Chambers in 1983. A 6-3 court ruled that the Nebraska legislative prayer was constitutional.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=463&invol=783
That, along with “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God we trust” on coins, and a few other loose ends, are under a different legal doctrine, termed “ceremonial deism” – which takes much the same tack as the recent argument from the Declaration of Independence here by Magellan01 did, that the country has a loose commitment to a rather abstract monotheism generally which does not constitute an unconstitutional “establishment of religion.”
“Ceremonial deism” is to me the same sort of bugaboo that “substantive due process” is to Bricker, so I’d prefer not to comment further about it in an informational mode. If someone wants to debate it, I’m more than willing to give my $2 standard spiel on why it’s wrong, but it would be hijacking A. Saccus’s thread to do so here.
Ammonius Saccus, why would any American patriot want to undermine the First Amendment? I see it as being a good thing for both the protection of the Church (and other religious institutions) and the preservation of the State.
I don’t follow your thinking.
I don’t think any private citizen has standing because they are not directly injured. No member of Congress is going to take on the issue. And if they do the Supreme Court will invent some doctrine that will make it ok, as *polycarp notes that they have already done in another context.
However, the NY Times last Sunday, I believe, reported on a situation where an evangelical Christian outreach mission was working in prisons, and providing prisoners participating in the program better facilities - provided they made progress, which was considered to be accepting Jesus. The person suing about this was a Catholic, who claimed that his religion was insulted in “therapy” sessions within the prison. The article said that Jews and Muslims would be accepted in the program, but that they would be still be subjected to its proselytizing.
Now I’m sure the programs you are involved in would do no such thing, but to check the government would have to get deeply involved with the behavior and religious activities of the involved organizations. We’d have to force religious organizations to not speak of religion in certain contexts, basically. Is that what we want to do? And are the supervisors of such activity, who may be evangelicals themselves, going to monitor it properly? How much are they going to resist a religious organization pushing for something that they may personally favor?
I wonder how they would feel about a program built around the concept that rationality, and the dispassionate analysis of alternatives, would make a prisoner go straight. This program would involve the hyper-rational analysis, and attack on, religion. Given the old survey showing that atheists are under-represented in federal prisons, it might have some benefit - but it would never fly, would it?
Fun fact: 300-odd Congresscritters voted for a “school prayer amendment” in 1997 that would have guaranteed public school students some of the rights that they were already guaranteed. On the day of the vote, 18 of those Congresscritters showed up at the pre-session Congressional prayer meeting.