Free Republic

I have argued since I first began writing and speaking on this issue that the First Amendment restrains only the actions of Congress. The first word in the First Amendment, after all, is the word "Congress." "Congress shall make no law..." The Founders quite intentionally were not imposing restraints on what a state could do in offering prayers before legislative assemblies, or what a city could do in erecting Ten Commandments monuments, or what a school could do in offering prayer and Bible reading over the intercom or at graduation. Congress and Congress alone is bound down by the chains...

After the marshal on Monday spoke the traditional “God save the United States and this honorable court,” the Supreme Court ruled that the upstate New York town of Greece does not violate the First Amendment’s prohibition of “establishment of religion” by opening its board of supervisors’ meetings with a prayer. This ruling would not scandalize James Madison and other members of the First Congress, which drafted and sent to the states for ratification the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. The Congress did this after hiring a chaplain. Three decades have passed since the court last...

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled organized prayer and Bible study in public schools unconstitutional in the early 1960s, conservative Christians have been trying to re-enter the secular arena. Take Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). The case, The New York Times wrote last year, "...challenged a 1968 Pennsylvania law that reimbursed religious schools for some expenses, including teachers' salaries and textbooks, so long as they related to instruction on secular subjects also taught in the public schools. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger ... said the law violated the First Amendment's prohibition of government establishment of religion. The ruling set out what...