Separation of Church and State

I’m amazed at all the liberal media articles I see today claiming Christine doesn’t know the First Amendment. Well, here’s one article that get’s it right!

Decrees Of Separation

First Amendment: A law school audience fell into fits of laughter when a Senate candidate asked, “Where in the Constitution is separation of Church and State?” In fact, the phrase is nowhere in the document.

Tuesday’s debate between Delaware’s U.S. Senate hopefuls before what was described as a crowd of “legal scholars and law students” at Widener University Law School in Wilmington generated quite some mirth among the assembled elites.

Tea Party-favored Republican nominee Christine O’Donnell had the temerity to ask her opponent to cite the provision of the Constitution that separates church and state.

There is, of course, no such passage. Those scoffing law scholars might want to look at the Constitution’s unadorned text instead of the judicial activist law review articles that take up so much of their day.

What the Constitution does say, in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, is that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — a restriction imposed upon the state to prevent its interference in religious practice.

Talk-radio king and Landmark Legal Foundation President Mark R. Levin explained the confusion of liberal judges and trial lawyers in his 2005 book, “Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America.”

The “Wall of Separation” phrase comes not from the Constitution, but from President Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802. As Levin notes, the obscure comment was virtually ignored for nearly a century and a half. It wasn’t until 1947 when Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black ruled in the Everson case — which actually upheld the use of taxpayer money to transport children to Catholic and other parochial schools — that the Jefferson metaphor was used to establish “the anti-religious precedent that has done so much damage to religious freedom.”

Levin’s argument is similar to that of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In his dissent in a 1985 ruling against silent school prayer, Rehnquist pointed out: “There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the ‘wall of separation’ that was constitutionalized in Everson.” He called Jefferson’s “wall” “a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging.”

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