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Let Freedom Ring |
Satire...Establishing a Crime Out of Nothing: The Lesson in Gibberish which Prohibited School PrayerThe All Purpose Miracle Amendment slices and dices or does just about anything. The Fourteenth Amendment miracle wonder was designed to free slaves, but we found it can prohibit protestants, minimize Mormons, say bye bye to Baptists, and castigate Catholics. How did we do it? We took the amendment's due process clause, that's the one requiring the government to follow the rule of law before taking away your rights, and we made it applicable to the First Amendment's establishment clause, on the legal theory that the establishment clause is a fundamental right, which if violated, is protected by due process. The only problem was, the establishment clause wasn't a fundamental right, but by applying the due process clause to it, we made it one! That gave us justification to apply the due process clause to it, and criminalize religion in the schools. Sound too good to be true? It is, or it's not, depending on how you view it. Does it hold up to law? No. Is legal? Yes! See what I mean? This may all sound like magic, but there's a logic to it, that is, if you thrive on illogic. Here's how we did it: The Founding Fathers prohibited Congress from establishing a religion, but the people were free to establish State religions. Nine of the Thirteen original States practiced some form of established religions in the early years following the founding of our country. The Civil War brought the Fourteenth Amendment. With a purpose of forcing the States to give the recently freed slaves the same rights enjoyed by the rest of us, this amendment prohibited the States from abridging the fundamental rights of any person without due process of law. It also did a little more, but this is all that we're interested in here. All we had to do was somehow put these two laws together and we might have a way to oust religion, but we had what looked like insurmountable problems. For starters, we had a prohibition on Congress that kind of looked like maybe a right, but it applied only to Congress, not the States. What it did was keep Washington's nose out of the hair of the people and States. We would have to find some way to apply it to the States, and call it a right, an important fundamental right, in fact, and the only way to do this was with the Fourteenth Amendment. After a few milliseconds of thought, and similarly deep contemplation, we applied the Fourteenth Amendment to the establishment clause, rewriting the First Amendment, so that the prohibition on Congress was now a prohibition on the States (Everson v. Board of Education, 1947). But we had a problem: We didn't have any legal justification for doing it. I'm just getting started. Without a justification, we couldn't apply the Fourteenth to the First, but we did have one! Having changed US law by applying the Fourteenth to the establishment clause, we applied the Fourteenth's due process clause to the new right that we'd just created, and this was justifiable, because the due process clause protects citizens from the kinds of rights violations like the one we just made by applying the Fourteenth to the First; well kind of, anyway. This gave us justification for applying the Fourteenth to the First in the first place. Recall, we didn't have a justification for applying the Fourteenth, but now we do, by applying it again. Because the applying the Fourteenth to the First Amendment establishment clause disallows the States from establishing religion, a State which permits school prayers (and therefore establishes a religion) is in violation of the First Amendment establishment clause against Congress, which is a fundamental right now, having been made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth. Voila! No school prayer. The trick is to apply the Fourteenth twice, and justify the former with the latter, and the latter with the former. If this sounds way too complicated or maybe doesn't make any sense, don't fret, just say "We used the Fourteenth!". That's the truth. We also needed to turn an innocent prayer into a grievous civil rights violation of paramount proportions, because due process doesn't work without it, if the State hasn't done anything wrong except follow the law, but this came about nearly automatically. The fundamental right that we created by applying the Fourteenth to the First twice was a protection against a State establishment of religion, with connotations of mandatory attendance, and perhaps more than 30 lashes for failure to submit. Now that's a grievous violation if there ever was one -- and there wasn't! We simply created it on paper and equated it with a prayer! The harmless religious practice is a grievous crime, the only crime worthy of substantive due process consideration, and, well, the rest is history. |
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