Well I guess that settles that then. 
My point is who would stand up and say they didn’t like ten commandments in a courthouse in 1860? You do know that momons also like the ten commandments, right?
The political and cultural environment of the time make your objection meaningless is what I meant to say. Just because no one complained about courthouse religious symbols doesn’t mean that they were in line with the law as written.
It was when Mel Brooks set it to music!
Not so much. For one thing, most of those stupid plaques are commericals. For a movie. ca 1956. The Ten Commandments.
For a second thing, even the one on the Supreme Court? Partial, showing only the law-related ones.
This might be nitpickery, but so far as I understand, this is not a “balancing test” as the term is used in American law. A balancing test is a test that sets forth factors that must be balanced against each other. This is a test in which all three prongs must be met; the prongs aren’t balanced against each other.
Couldn’t this description be equally applied to nearly any question of American constitutional law? As I said, I can’t recall seeing any other test that’s significantly clearer than this.
The point I’ve always wanted to make about this case is the absurdity of walking into a courthouse, and the first thing you see is a list of laws most of which are not enforced in that very court. The distinction between religious law and the secular law becomes quite glaring in this case. The 10C are laws espoused by the Judeo-Christian tradition upon the faithful, the secular law is imposed by the government upon the citizenry.
Better to have a courthouse display a symbol reassuring people who enter the courthouse that their cases will be decided according to universal secular principles rather by what very well may be someone else’s religious beliefs. Religion is one of the things that Lady Justice is blindfolded so she won’t look to while weighing a question in her scales.
The issue is that ITR Champion is reading the Establishment Clause as “Congress shall pass no law … establishing a religion”, i.e., making one denomination the Established Church of the U.S.A., à la the Church of England. This is not the text of the clause nor the construction put on it by 20th Century courts: “respecting an establishment of religion” means, roughly, “tending to set up an appurtenance of a religious faith by and with the authority of government.” (As Bricker notes, it is the Fourteenth Amendment that prohibits states, and their creations the local governments, school districts, etc., from doing what the First Amendment forbids the Federal government to do.)
Some people, including legal scholars, construe the Establishment Clause as prohibiting any religious exercise or display on public (government-owned or -leased) property. Others, following the standard 19th Century interpretation, given new life in the late 20th Century by the writings of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, construe it to mean that government must be neutral in regards to matters of religion. E.g., the city may not spend municipal funds to display a creche in the public park, but may consent to the local Council of Churches displaying such a creche there – on condition that if the local Wiccan coven or mosque or synagogue wishes to put up a holiday display for Samhain or Ramadan or the High Holy Days, they must be given completely equal privileges as the Christians. As a municipal employee, I can hang a cross or crucifix on the wall of my office – but only if I’m willing to tolerate a coworker hanging a Mogen David or a pentacle on his wall.
Personally I prefer the ‘neutrality’ approach, though it is something of a minority vie among interpreters.
But the key point toward this thread is that the “law of the land” is what the courts have interpreted the Constitution to mean – the Lemon test, not “something like the Church of England.”
My personal stance would be that the Constitution certainly doesn’t look favorably on the government getting in bed with a single religious faith. With that end-goal in sight, it’s easiest to just keep them entirely separate.
If you’ve got a married man who spends a lot of time flirting with women, that’s not really breaking his marriage vows, but I’d be hard pressed to come up with a compelling reason for him to be doing that. If no one complains then I suppose it’s not a big matter (up until the point where adultery occurs), but if someone does complain, you’re better off to just slap the guy on the head and tell him to get a clue than to debate whether he was within his rights. He shouldn’t have been heading down that pathway anyways.
Actually, what Jefferson said was
Since Jefferson was quoting the First Amendment here, he clearly was expressing his opinion that the establishment and free exercise clauses built “a wall of separation between Church & State”; in other words, it was precisely on what sorts of things are unconstitutional that Jefferson was expressing his opinion.
The “state” here was Congress; that is, the federal government of the United States of America. Before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, no part of the Bill of Rights restricted state governments in any way. A state government could presumably have made dissing the state legislature punishable by boiling in oil (since the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment and the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Eighth Amendment were both originally restraints on the power of Congress); states would have been restrained from such actions only by their own constitutions and by the democratic process, not by any branch of the federal government.
The Fourteenth Amendment was eventually held to impose most of the protections of the Bill of Rights on the states as well as the federal government; as the 1947 U.S. Supreme Court decision Everson v. Board of Education put it:
Yes, absolutely. Every American is free to proclaim his or her trust in God, or trust in the gods, or distrust in God, or lack of belief in God altogether.
However, no American or group of Americans have the right to force others to profess their religious beliefs. You can put up a monument to your God on your own front lawn; you cannot put up a monument on my front lawn. Since the courthouse is the common property of us both, you cannot post the Ten Commandments there, and I cannot post the Affirmations of Humanism. Or else we all have an equal right to post what we please, and soon the courthouse will become rather cluttered. As Polycarp noted above, there are gray areas, such as public parks which have been made into “free speech forums” where everyone is free to post their signs. Personally I question the wisdom of many of these free speech forums; this is not a socialist country where all land and other real property is collectively owned, and there is plenty of private property, private airwaves, and private cyberspace for everyone to publicly proclaim their views, without having to turn public parks and other property held in common by all citizens into rhetorical battlefields where different groups vie to erect bigger signs for their gods.
But which version of the 10 Commandments? They are not the same among translations of the Bible used by different religions. Which Bible to use in school was one of the reasons that Roman Catholic parochial schools got started.
Easily? Yes. Reasonably? No.
Why not reasonably? It seems reasonable to me to say that allowing religious symbolism in those various official governmental locations, assuming of course that those symbols refer to a particular faith, could be seen as establishment of religion and the acceptance and promotion of one religion over all the others. Where’s the unreasonability?
Psst- look above the Eagle’s head on the Great Seal.
Darn Elders of Zion!
It’s not nitpickery at all, and it’s a valid point. I think (and I don’t have my Bumper Book O’Religious Jurisprudence with me) it tends to be applied more as a balancing test, and in particular the third prong ends up with lots of balancing. I will try, if I get to my garage and dig through the old binders, to find the stuff I am talking about.
Again, there is a fair point there. Lemon has, however, led to some seemingly incompatible decisions across the country. I don’t know if it is still the case, but I believe it was at one stage unconstitutional for the state to provide maps for display in parochial schools, but constitutional to provide text books, or vice versa.
The problem may well come from the wording and interpretation of the religion clauses themselves - freedom of religion has been defined in such a way as to set it up almost in opposition to non-establishment. Hence the ridiculous idea of tax exemptions being part of religious freedom.
Should it matter if it is a specific religion? Government should neither restrict or promote specific religions or religion in general, it should be neutral on the subject.
Are you referring to the 13 stars in star pattern? The ones symbolizing the thirteen states? The ones that are five pointed not six? That wouldn’t fit in a five pointed pattern because there are thirteen of them?
Look, I don’t care if we take a symbol that had religious meaning and change it. Stars are such common symbols that they truly depend on context to define them. I also have no problem with lady justice, even though she is based on an old religion. I have no problem with the image of the ten commandments at the Supreme Court (part of a frieze showing historic law givers). But I ask with complete seriousness if you would be OK with replacing “In God We Trust” with “There is no God but Allah, and Mohamed is his Prophet?” To me they are equivalent, because they are both statements I do not support that I am helping to fund to distribute. I am being taxed to promote God and that was one of the fundamental things the First Amendment was trying to prevent, forcing citizens to pay to support a religion they did not follow.
Jonathan
How so? Putting the Ten Commandments on government property or “In God we Trust” on the money is not sponsorship or financing or active involvement of the sovereign in religious activity". Look at it this way. The Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law for all Americans, right? That doesn’t mean that the government is banned from recognizing, celebrating, or endorsing certain people or groups of people. The government can still recognize Black History Month, or include portraits of certain persons on government property, or issue publications praising certain people. So likewise the government must protect followers of all religions equally, but it is not banned from putting a religious symbol on government property.
More generally, though, debates on this topic usually focus around whether bans on religious symbols were from the Constitution originally or were invented by judges in the 20th century. So far no one defends them as being original to the Constitution.
The Supreme Court has been schizophrenic on that sort of issue in recent years, allowing some displays while banning others. But as far as I know, no such case has been heard after the two most recent appointments, so we don’t know where the current court stands.
That would be the case if the Constitution included only a freedom clause, and not a non-establishment clause. Which incidentally was put first in the relevant part.
Lets take this to a logical extreme. Should it be acceptable/ for the government to impose a special tax to raise a monument to Zoroaster? Do think you should be accessed for a special levy to build a mosque? If not, then why should some of my taxes go to promote generic Christianity?
You are basically asking me to tithe against my will.
Jonathan
The post by Max that triggered this thread said, “the Constitution clearly forbids it”. Now am I supposed to accept that the conclusion follows “clearly” from the fact that the meaning of the Constitution was intended to change over time, and that this particular clause was supposed to gradually expand? Such an interpretation gives judges the power to allow or deny whatever they choose, without any consideration for the text, the original intent, or the will of the people.
I can respect people who personally believe what you’re saying, but I don’t see how people like Max can have such total confidence in such a tenuous argument.
I’m thinking he understands that feeling.
Writing “In God we Trust” on the money or the Ten Commandments in a courthouse does not promote Christianity, any more than putting a picture of Barack Obama on the wall promotes the Democratic Party. In both cases, the government is acknowledging the will of the people. (Further, none of this is tithing, either. To tithe is to pay directly to a religious institution.)