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The Supreme Court's Black v. White "Neutrality" in respect to ReligionIn the last century, the U.S. Supreme Court declared it a fundamental right of persons to be free from any semblance of state endorsement of religion in a public institutions, formulating this new privilege by rewording a law barring Congress from interfering with religion in the States to that of barring religion in the States, the Court using as it's authority the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause which gives state residents U.S. protection regarding equal treatment and a fair legal process. The Court has devised what they call the Lemon test for determining what, where, and when to ban religion from the public schools. Several qualifiers must be met, including whether the event has a secular purpose, and school officials are required to be neutral in respect to religion. A neutrality regarding religion would seem an equitable test of law. If the event by a school neither promotes nor inhibits religion, a fair policy should to be in place, but is this what the Court has done? The Court has repeatedly ruled that students may initiate religious speech or practices within normal school limits of tolerance, but faculty cannot, nor may faculty aid a student. Thus, a neutrality exists regarding students, but what of the faculty? Any religious activity initiated by faculty or by students with faculty assistance will, by definition fail the Lemon test, because a mere mention of religion is defined by the Court test as an advocating of religion. The Court portrays a sense of fairness by the prohibiting of both positive and negative religious statements and activities, but this is an illusion because the prohibiting of one activity while allowing adversarial activities cannot be neutral. This may be illustrated by equating religion with black and it's opposite with white. For example, the question might be "How was life created?"
Note that Grey is the neutral belief, containing elements of both God and Evolution, but the Supreme Court will deem the third item as the neutral element, the first two excluded because both contain elements of Black, which is prohibited. We could try a different list, containing both God, and no god, in our search for the neutrality used by the Court's Lemon test:
The above list will entirely fail the Lemon test, all elements being prohibited, so we must revisit and explore the opposites of our earlier list:
The first element fails, and the second succeeds. If only the white element can succeed then it must be the neutral element:
Combining the two gives us an unbalanced hybrid, but this most accurately reflects the Court's "neutral" test, which gives an illusion of fairness without being fair. The middle element passes and both ends fail, presenting a picture of a balanced or neutral center element, but it is entirely a false presentation, prohibiting one side of the argument and allowing the other. The Court's test is not neutral on religion. The Lemon test recently led a federal appeals court to quite logically ban the Pledge of Allegiance for containing the word "God", and should it stand, will eventually bar the Great Seal of the United States which in Latin includes the phrase "God has favored us", designed by the very founding fathers that the Lemon test cites in it's justification for the ban. The Supreme Court will at some point be required to choose whether the founding fathers wished to prohibit their own words from government, even Thomas Jefferson's opening paragraph in his bill for religious liberty before the Virginia State Legislature, which is not "neutral" in respect to religion, having repeated references to it Perhaps one day the Court will relearn that the founding fathers had wished to protect, not prohibit the free expression of religion. States' Liberty Party, October 12, 2002. |
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