Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Nikov]

No, you can't use certain 'code words' in an election year or you risk losing your tax exempt status, but Pelosi has no problem telling bishops to support her political aims. She's hardly acting in a personal capacity when she calls a conference to press the issue of immigration reform to Catholic clergy. Pop quiz, what religion are most Central and South-Americans?

[Servant Corps]

The fun part is, the U.S. Senate has ratified the following (as part of the Treaty of Tripoli)

... the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion ...

Since that phrase was not before the 'declaratory' part of that clause, it's not really a part of US law. In treaties and judicial opinions, you can have 'fluff', which basically has no legal standing whatsoever.

This is true, yes.  However, think about what you're essentially implying.  Could a later ruling by a later court invalidate that prior ruling?  Yes, and it would require a majority of the Supreme Court Justices to decide to overturn many decades of precedent and countless lower-court decisions based on such, derived from an interpretation of the Constitution so ingrained in the public psyche that sixty-three years ago it was worth pissing off Catholics for, and has ever since to been taught to schoolchildren of all ages.  It's about the one part of derived Constitutional precedent everyone (outside the Tea Party anyway) can agree on outside of the abolition of separate-but-equal.

That doesn't mean it's right to just forget about where our laws actually come from. And in fact, the abolition of "seperate-but-equal" overturned many decades of precedent. Just because consensus is in favor of this precedent does not mean that the Supreme Court cannot revisit this issue in the future.

It is also important to know that the Supreme Court was the one that made the Separation of Church and State have a legal meaning (rather than the 1st Amendment), because it also means they're the ones that ends up defining it (see the Lemon Test). This is a weak point, I admit, since the Supreme Court has to end up defining most stuff.

EDIT: Alright I admit, this was a low-quality response, Aqizzar, and I'm sorry for that.

[Ampersand]

The whole argument is like one group of people claiming that the bible says that you shouldn't kill people, while another claims that it doesn't, stating instead that it says "Thou shalt not kill." Of course, the people in the first group know what the actual letter of the phrase is, but the letter of the phrase is irrelevant. Over the course of the past two centuries, the legal minds of the United States, it's courts, and it's legislators have enforced and reiterated a strict separation of Church and State in countless rulings and laws.

Anyone who pops up in the year 2010 and says, thinking they're being clever, "Hur hur, the constitution doesn't really say that," while ignoring the historical context completely is either ignorant, or being intentionally disingenuous.