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Pledge Ban's Long Established PrecedentCongress Joins the 50 States as just another Victim of Misapplied Justiceby States Liberty Party After a half century of paddling it's 50 children for saying dirty words like God or Jesus in the schoolroom, the federal Supreme Court turned on it's peer, Congress, and washed it's mouth out with soap. The 1st Amendment prohibition on Congress was intended to prevent the federal government from interfering with religion in the States, yet the Court has turned the law around so that the central government controls religion in the States, defining precisely how and where religion may be practiced or prohibited. Even though the Supreme Court always invokes the name of Thomas Jefferson
when
The Supreme Court therefore could not misconstrue the 1st Amendment Establishment Clause reading that Congress shall not create an establishment of religion to mean anything but a national church, not a prohibition of the word God from the government; that is, unless the Court made a series of small turns founded on seeming logic, and never bothered to look at the roadmap of where they started or where they intended to end up. This long string of precedents set by the court prohibiting religion in the States is how the court arrived at the wrong destination regarding Congress. The Court must filter the prohibiting of religion in the States through the 14th Amendment, a civil war era law that had intended to grant civil rights to the Negro, but this side road isn't necessary with respect to an act by Congress of establishing a religion: The court may act directly on authority of the 1st Amendment, because the 1st Amendment is applicable to Congress, and only to Congress.. It should seem abundantly clear, in light of the Founding Fathers deep religious convictions, that a prohibiting of "an establishment of religion" cannot translate to a prohibiting of the concept of religion or idea of there being a God, and that to prohibit the idea of God, but not opposing ideologies, amounts to a condoning of no-God, the state creating "an establishment of atheism". The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck down the phrase "under God" from being applied in schools by Congress did not simply reason this out, they carefully followed a 50 year old chain of long established court precedents that have denied the States their 1st Amendment right to establish and regulate religion in their public institutions. Several tests have been established by the court in wrestling when and when-not a religious message may be uttered or viewed in a classroom or other public building, so that the federal court may have a defined set of rules for regulating what the 1st Amendment forbade them from regulating. Primarily, the Lemon test is applied (Lemon v. Kurtzman), requiring a "neutrality" regarding religion: Nothing may be said by teacher, staff, or student acting as an agent of the teacher either to encourage or put down religion, Translated, this means that no utterance of religion can be made, because the mere mention of religion will fail the Lemon test of neutrality. "God" being a foundation of religion is taboo and may not be uttered at all. The Lemon test, decided back in 1971, had thus already removed the word God from the vocabulary of any public teacher or other state employee, and the States had changed their laws and policies to be in compliance with the federal law. In fact, such an example came up regarding the Columbine School shootings in Colorado. Parents of slain children were prohibited by the school from displaying a tile reading "God is Love", because it contained a religious message. This case, having a strange twist of the school prohibiting the word to be compliant with the Supreme Court Lemon test, is currently on appeal to the Supreme Court and may be decided on the rights of the States to prohibit religion, not the federal Constitution, even though the state had only tried to follow federal policy.. If the Supreme Court, invoking the civil rights amendment to supposedly apply the federal 1st Amendment directly to all of the States, has prohibited the States from mentioning the word God in public institutions, then obviously Congress cannot pass a law mandating a mention of the word God without violating the same rules. Although probably even a Third Grader could see the distortion the court has made in the translating, the district courts are generally bound to high court decisions. If the pledge ban is unconstitutional then the 1971 Lemon test is too. The Supreme Court began to go wrong in 1947 (Everson v Board of Education), when it directly applied federal law to the States, contrary to the 14th Amendment, the court's cited authority. The federal government and the States have separated powers, by design, but the court's action eliminated these separate assigned duties and made it a one-way street, Washington now dictating all laws (or whatever laws the court so deemed) to states. A creating of "an establishment of religion" by states would be a very different concept than by Washington, because Washington had not been assigned a duty of educating the public. In fact it is doubtful that the Founding Fathers had ever envisioned an Establishment Clause for the states, but rather would have included just a Freedom of Religion clause, guaranteeing the free exercise but not total prohibition of religion in schools. The mess made by a court that ignored the concept of federalism and shared powers has brought about the clearly flawed test now required by Congress. The Lemon test made no distinction between the 1st Amendment's congressional prohibition and the court's applying the federal law to the states, mandating a test that "First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion, [cites] finally, the statute must not foster "an excessive government entanglement with religion." The problems which the court had of separating religion from the daily lives of parents and children in the state run schools on a more rigid principle than simply the ensuring of freedom of religion, was a task which the Founding Fathers had not intended, yet this, not a watch on congressional abuse of the 1st Amendment is what wrote the Lemon test. Thus, when the same test was applied now to Congress, it now found that even the Great Seal and words commonly used by the Founding Fathers now violated the constitutional safeguards of the Founding Fathers. Perhaps the Supreme Court's Lemon test may ultimately not lend itself to spanking it's equal sized federal brother, and otherwise it will be a matter of waiting until the Great Seal comes before the court and it must then must reason how Jefferson had approved a design for the government that he had believed must be prohibited by the government. March 2, 2003
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exercising it's self-appointed role controlling religion, he and other
Founding Fathers could have only intended that the1st Amendment do no more
than restrict a national church that might snuff out state churches
and individual religious freedom, for Jefferson, Adams
and Franklin aided in and approved the design of the Great Seal reading in Latin
"God has favored us", with a design portraying the new government as a
nation "under God".