I NO LONGER KNOW WHAT TO THINK

“I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk” said Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, after winning the vote in a primary for re-election to Congress in the Mid-term elections. Two days before the primary she apparently told a religious service “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church.”

 

What is most disconcerting is not so much her brainless stupidity in not understanding the principles of the Constitution and the meaning of the first amendment, but the fact that, on the basis of this display of colossal ignorance, she has been supported by Republican voters who seek to give her another term in Congress.

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

The very foundation of the United States, so far as the myths of history are concerned, was to allow people to live and worshipe as they saw fit. The reason many left the old world behind, was to avoid the continuing persecution of their religious way of life, and establish a system of government that did not allow the state to interfere with any religious practice. It was meant to be an end of bigotry - freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the freedom to express grievance.  It is unconstitutional to make laws prohibiting or curtailing the ability to think freely and to express one views. The state would henceforth be set apart. What we do in our private lives will not be interfered with by our administrative lives. It follows therefore, that the state is free of religion and must maintain an objective distance. What belongs to and is part of the state shall be separate. 

 

To that end, schools established and supported by the state shall be free of religion. The pupils and parents are perfectly free to exercise the own religious beliefs, but cannot impose them on others who have different beliefs. All beliefs can therefor co-exist in the religiously neutral environment of the school. The citizen is of course perfectly capable of setting up their own private school or educational establishment to promote and teach their religion, but not with the support of the state, which, constitutionally must take an objective stance apart. 

 

Like most things, rational argument in the United States, the attempt at objectivity, impartiality and equitability, has become skewered by dogmatic religious belief. What the founding fathers sought to establish has, seemingly been slowly eroding under the weight of fundamentalist rhetoric. 

There is an opinion piece by Barbara Perry, published by CNN on the 29^th June 2022, entitled:

Brick by Brick, the wall between religion and government is collapsing in America.

Ms B Perry

Barbara Ann Perry is a presidency and U.S. Supreme Court expert, as well as a biographer of the Kennedys. She is also the Gerald L. Baliles Professor and Director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Centre, where she co-chairs the Presidential Oral History Program. As an oral historian, Perry has conducted more than 100 interviews for the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush Presidential Oral History Projects, researched the President Clinton Project interviews, and directed the Edward Kennedy Oral History Project.

Perry was born in Louisville, Kentucky. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from University of Louisville. Perry earned a Master of Arts degree in Politics, philosophy, and economics from Hertford College, Oxford. Perry earned a Ph.D. in American government from the University of Virginia. 

 

She writes:

 

What an irony that the central character's name in the Supreme Court's most recent school-prayer drama is Joseph Kennedy, the same appellation as President John F. Kennedy's father. Facing strong anti-Catholic sentiment, Kennedy, the first Irish Catholic to become president, felt compelled to proclaim in 1960 his adherence to strict separation of church and state, assuring opponents that his policies wouldn't reflect his personal religious views or the teachings of his faith.

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," the candidate told a meeting of Protestant ministers in Houston. "I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."

Because the US Supreme Court's current six person majority (John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett), all with conservative Catholic backgrounds, have expressed interest in historical bases for judicial decisions, it's worth noting that Kennedy's assertions not only preserved his political viability but reflected Jeffersonian ideals firmly embedded in our two-centuries-old constitutional cosmos.

The court's ruling this week in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District ignores our founding values and eschews decades of its own precedents that enshrined them. Gorsuch's majority opinion, joined by his five fellow conservatives, ruled that Kennedy, a football coach at a Bremerton, Washington, public school has First Amendment freedom of speech and religion rights to kneel and pray at the 50-yard line after games, surrounded by players and spectators. Allowing him to do so doesn't violate the Constitution's ban on state establishment of religion, according to the nation's highest court.

The First Amendment's clauses guaranteeing free exercise of religion and prohibiting government's establishment thereof have been on a collision course since they entered the US Constitution in 1791. Simply put, does government allowance of religion in the public square constitute establishing it? To unravel this conundrum, Supreme Court justices have taken three different approaches:

Strict separation of church and state: This position hews most closely to Thomas Jefferson's vision of a "wall" between government and religion that he adopted in 1802 to explain his agreement with a Connecticut Baptist association's concept of religious liberty.

The Supreme Court first adopted the wall metaphor in an 1878 case upholding a federal law against polygamy in the territories. Justice Hugo Black became its most prolific champion, defining it explicitly in a 1947 case where he distinguished between allowing government reimbursement of bus fare to religious-school students' parents and banning state aid directly to parochial schools. He applied it in 1962 to overturn compelled state-written prayer in public schools. Then-President Kennedy responded that parents could encourage their children to pray at home and in houses of worship.

Neutrality toward religion: Adopted as a judicial midpoint between separation and accommodation, Chief Justice Warren Burger developed the “Lemon test”, named for the party in a 1971 case that struck down Pennsylvania's aid to religious schools. To maintain government neutrality regarding religion, a policy had to have a secular purpose, neither advance nor inhibit religion and avoid excessive entanglement between church and state.

Moderately conservative Justices Sandra O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy (no relation to the president or the football coach) added two more components to neutrality. States' relation to religion should neither appear to endorse it nor coerce people, especially students, to participate in it. Applying this test, in 1992, Kennedy struck down the practice of prayers offered by clergy at public school commencements.

Accommodation of religion: Conservative justices believe that strict adherence to the separation approach violates the free exercise of religion. They view the First Amendment's Establishment Clause as prohibiting the creation of a state church and raising public money to support it, which the founders knew privileged the official religion to the detriment of others.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia, a leading advocate of religious accommodation, argued in 1994, "Once this Court has abandoned text and history as guides, nothing prevents it from calling religious toleration the establishment of religion." Accommodationists now represent a half-dozen votes on the current Supreme Court.

In each of the four religion cases this term, supporting the football coach’s prayer at public school football games, allowing parents to use Maine's tuition grants for religious school tuition, requiring Texas to permit a spiritual adviser to pray over and comfort death-row inmates at their executions and siding with a Christian group that wanted to be among those private organizations allowed to fly its flag outside of Boston's City Hall, the court adopted an accommodationist posture. Arguably, the overturning of Roe v. Wade also reflects the triumph of a conservative religious viewpoint, though judicial norms prevent such an admission.

Brick by brick, if not by bulldozer, the wall between religion and government is collapsing. Does it matter? It does if the United States still wants not only to protect religion from government but government from religion.

As the founders feared, when religious faith becomes the guiding force in politics, the historic American experiment in creating a pluralistic republic is most at risk. Allowing the utmost religious freedom, within the bounds of high walls between church and state, has spared the US from the kinds of religious wars that have plagued human history and riled modern nations.

President Kennedy's devotion to the Jeffersonian principle of separating religion and government to promote religious freedom has proven more salutary to the American regime than will be the desire to accommodate Coach Kennedy's prayer spectacle at public school football games. 

 

One could suggest that the rot started with Justice Scalia whose views pushed the court into cementing the law on the possession of weapons; but, the current make up the court, now even more politicised toward republican conservatism and big business, has managed to not only skewer the United States, but the world at large with its latest ruling relating to climate change and the capability of the United States meeting its environmental commitments.

 

Returning to Ms Boebert, she is only one of many who would applaud the trend. What she fails to see is that with religion dictating the government, particularly a fundamentalist regime, it is more than likely that she would lose her right of free speech as well her right to bear arms which are currently protected by the secular nature of the Constitution. 

 

Weapons and free thought do not sit well with hard line Religion One only has to see the results of Islamist fundamentalism around the world to realise that only the powers that be would have AK47’s and no back talk of any kind is to be tolerated. Indeed, hard line religion and free thought are poles apart.  

One wonders just what sort of religion Lauren Boebert adheres to. In any event, what she is too ignorant to foresee, is that by continuing on the path she seems to be striving for, she will bring about chaos and ruin of the very country she purports to make great. By dismantling the very building blocks of the rule of law she will only promote nothing but her own destruction.

 

Turning to Boris Johnson, journalists reporting from other countries have made clear the continuing irony of the British Prime Minister, glowingly supporting the Ukraine in its bid for freedom and joining the European Union, and enjoining the ‘allies’ to increase support for the Ukrainian forces. How this charlatan, who pushed the United Kingdom away from the EU and the ‘allies’, who deliberately intends to breach agreements he voluntarily entered into, dares to associate himself with western democratic leaders, is a public outrage. His attempts at grandstanding and being buddy buddy with the members of NATO and the G7 have not gone unnoticed by the foreign press, who now regard him as extremely suspect. Who does he think he's kidding? How the conservative party of Great Britain maintains this aloof posture in the face of what has become a global embarrassment is … I am lost for words.