SB 1062 should never have had to be written

The First Amendment protects only the practice of the Christian faith.

The Arizona Republic gathered the twenty, or so, protestors against S.B. 1062 close together for a photo to place on the front cover of their Thursday edition. The gathering together is an attempt to show that thousands of protestors came to their demonstration.

In the center of the photo they placed a guy who just happens to be able to afford the tab-collar clergy shirt with a sign about how religions should be against this legislation. I am not sure from which Internet “U” this person obtained his certification, but they certainly had no requirement to read the Bible.

The “columnists” at the Republic are in full swing typing out their indignation at the “discrimination.”

Of course, when you are dealing with a group of people who get their Constitutional training from the Salon and Russia Today web sites, it is difficult for them to understand that this legislation should never have been written. You see, there is already a law that protects the right of those of the Christian faith to not serve those who are clearly abhorrent to that faith.

It’s called the First Amendment.

The First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;….

Congress is the law making branch of the country.This amendment states that the legislative branch of government MAY NOT create any law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Such as “Hate Crimes” legislation targeted at Christians.

These people will be first to throw that “Separation of Church and State” myth at you. Very few of them even knows where that phrase originates. It is a portion of a line that comes from a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists of 1802. It was a personal opinion, not a legal one. The Baptists were concerned that Congress was creating laws that would adversely affect the practice of their religion. The “wall of separation between Church & State” applied to the government—NOT the Christians.

This wall was explained more fully in a legal opinion by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story several years later:

“The real object of the [first] amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judiams, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. It thus cut off the means of religious persecution, (the vice and pest of former ages,) and of the subversion of the rights of conscience in matters of religion, which had been trampled upon almost from the days of the Apostles to the present age. The history of the parent country had afforded the most solemn warnings and melancholy instructions on this head; and even New England, the land of the persecuted puritans, as well as other colonies, where the Church of England had maintained its superiority, would furnish out a chapter, as full of the darkest bigotry and intolerance, as any, which should be found to disgrace the pages of foreign annals. Apostacy, heresy, and nonconformity had been standard crimes for public appeals, to kindle the flames of persecution, and apologize for the most atrocious triumphs over innocence and virtue.”—Story, Joseph (1833) Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Company. Cambridge: Brown, Shattuck, and Co. Volume III, page 728, §1871.

The First Amendment was meant only to protect the Christian faith. When the founders spoke of religion, they meant the Christian religion. They did not have to keep saying the Christian religion because everyone knew that is what they were talking about.

Wonder what the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, thought of this sense of free exercise of religion? He wrote about it. Wanna hear it? Here it goes…

In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.

…

In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

This was from his unpublished dissertation generally just referred to as Property.

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