In 2000, the Supreme Court continued perfecting its skill at misdirection by citing itself in a decision that created a new constitutional standard for the “establishment of religion.” In the case of Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, the majority held that student-led, voluntary, non-denominational prayer was “perceived” government sponsorship of prayer, thus a violation of the Establishment Clause. Further, the court held that any policy that made “nonadherents” feel like “outsiders” was unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court, in defiance of centuries of Anglo-Saxon law, the words of our own Founders, and the plain language of the Constitution itself, had in the course of about 80 years obliterated the Constitution and altered the proper relationship between government and religion. The next plank of the platform was carved from a phrase Thomas Jefferson likely never knew would be so wrested.
Everyone has heard the phrase “separation of church and state.” The anti-religious wail those words as a war cry against any “actual” or “perceived” influence of faith on government. As is evident from the analysis presented above, that phrase exists nowhere in the Constitution. It has its origins in a letter sent by our third President in response to one sent to him by a church in Connecticut.
As mentioned above, Connecticut maintained an established religion (the Congregational Church) until 1818. In 1801, members of the Baptist denomination in Danbury sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson, plaintively setting forth their difficulties at being an officially disfavored community of faith.
In his response, Jefferson sympathized with his correspondents and declared his hope that “their [Connecticut's] legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Far from being advocacy of the relegation of religion to solitary confinement in the private sphere, Jefferson cites the Establishment Clause itself as the model for other legislatures. As President, and as a student of the law, Jefferson undoubtedly understood that the First Amendment applied those restrictions on Congress, not on the church. As a perhaps relevant bit of context, the day after Jefferson penned the letter to the Danbury Baptists (January 3), he attended a worship service conducted in the House of Representatives presided over by a Baptist minister. Hardly the behavior of a man opposed to the offering of prayer in a government venue.
Sometimes folks are targeted because they are AHs, has nothing to do with race.
