Interesting Links from Kos
Make sure you caught these links at Kos.
Some really bizarre and scary news here. The scariest may be that my home state of Missouri is apparently pondering whether to make Christianity the state religion. Yes, that's as patent a violation of the Establishment Clause as one could imagine.
Note that Kos's description of the piece on Blair is misleading. The Independent piece contains nothing to suggest that Blair thinks that God led him to invade Iraq. He rather just says that God will judge the decision. I mean, once you start talking about invisible supernatural beings, it all sounds pretty crazy to me, but somehow the latter seems a little less batty than the former.
Make sure you caught these links at Kos.
Some really bizarre and scary news here. The scariest may be that my home state of Missouri is apparently pondering whether to make Christianity the state religion. Yes, that's as patent a violation of the Establishment Clause as one could imagine.
Note that Kos's description of the piece on Blair is misleading. The Independent piece contains nothing to suggest that Blair thinks that God led him to invade Iraq. He rather just says that God will judge the decision. I mean, once you start talking about invisible supernatural beings, it all sounds pretty crazy to me, but somehow the latter seems a little less batty than the former.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:10 AM
3 Comments:
"The scariest may be that my home state of Missouri is apparently pondering whether to make Christianity the state religion. Yes, that's as patent a violation of the Establishment Clause as one could imagine."
Winston,
While I agree with your sentiment and share your alarm, it is unfortunately far from clear that ALL of the Bill of Rights applies to the states. This presumption apparently relies on the concept of 'Incorporation', in which the B of R applies to the states as well as federal government. I'm not a Constitutional lawyer, but my impression based on the research I've done on this in the past is that the application of the Amendments to the states has been piecemeal, both legislatively and judicially.
So unless it's counter to Missouri's constitution, I'm not sure you can definitively say that it's a *violation* of the Establishment Clause, despite the fact that it contravenes the Clause.
Perhaps someone more versed than I in Constitutional law could shed some light on this question.
In the meantime, I did find this:
"One of the greatest changes in the interpretation of the Constitution came with the passage of the 14th Amendment after the conclusion of the Civil War. It was designed to assist newly freed slaves in the transition to freedom and to protect them from acts of the Southern states, and also to overturn the decision in the Dred Scott case that ruled that persons of African descent could not be citizens of the United States even if they were born in the United States. The amendment was successful in this endeavor, legally, if not in reality.
But this sentence had and continues to have long-lasting implications on the application of the Bill of Rights to the states:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The "Privileges and Immunities Clause" has been interpreted as applying the Bill of Rights, which lists the privileges and immunities of the citizens, to the states. Known as "incorporation," the application of the Bill to the states did not come all at once, nor was it complete. Even today, there are some parts of the Bill which have not been incorporated. The process began unsuccessfully in the late 1800's and continued unsuccessfully right up until the 1930's. In 1947, however, in Adamson v. California (332 U.S. 46 [1947]), the Supreme Court began to accept the argument that the 14th Amendment requires the states to follow the protections of the Bill of Rights. Historians both agreed and disagreed with the Court's contention that the framers of the 14th Amendment intended incorporation since its passage ... but historians do not sit on the Court. Their opinions were less important than those of the Justices.
The process of selectively incorporating the clauses of the Bill of Rights probably began in Twining v. New Jersey (268 U.S. 652 [1925]) which contemplated the incorporation of some of the aspects of the 8th Amendment - not because they were a part of the Bill of Rights but because they seemed to be fundamental to the concept of due process. This process of incorporating parts of the Bill of Rights because of their connection to due process began to run in parallel with the selective incorporation doctrine, where parts of the Bill of Rights were ruled to be enforceable on the states by virtue of the 14th Amendments, whether or not due process applied.
Thus in the early 1960's, the Establishment Clause, the right to counsel, the rights of free speech, assembly, and petition, and the right against unreasonable searches and seizures were quickly incorporated. Since the early 60's, almost every clause in the Bill of Rights has been incorporated (notable exceptions are the 2nd and 3rd Amendments, the grand jury indictment clause of the 5th Amendment, and the 7th Amendment)."
http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_bor.html
Whoa, thanks, LC. I thought that the application of the 1st amendment to the states via the 14th amendment was fairly straight-forward... Shows what I know.
That's the great thing about running a blog like this...spew out some half-baked BS and get actual, you know, information in response.
What a freakin' scam...
Good ol' American antidisestablishmentarianism.
I think it's a bad idea for a state to simply declare an "official religion." I think they should put it up for bids, like being the Official Beer of the NFL. The Scientologists would take a stab at it, the Baha'is could use the exposure. Then again, the UAE would probably just swoop in and buy it for Wahhabism.
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