Christine got it 100% right. Let’s revisit.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20020015-503544.html
“The First Amendment does?” O’Donnell asked. “Let me just clarify: You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?”
“Government shall make no establishment of religion,” Coons responded, reciting from memory the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Coons was off slightly: The first amendment actually reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”)
“That’s in the First Amendment...?” O’Donnell responded.
Just now, Rush made the same point I made in 84: she was assuming her audience knew the distinction between non-establishment and separation. Rush said, “That’s the mistake too many of us conservatives make.” Instead of explaining her point and thereby showing that Coons doesn’t even know that separation is not the same as non-establishment and that he had simply assumed that, since non-establishment is there, so too separation is there, instead of nailing that down, she responded with a skeptical “That’s in the First Amendment.”
If she had just replaced the “that’s” with “Separation” it would have helped, though to her audience and to Coons, “separation” is in there because non-establishment is in there. That’s the fallacy she needs to disabuse them of and she had an opportunity to do it and did not try.
Rush is making exactly my point.
I did not see the debate. I relied on the wording of the Fox Article:
“When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell asked: “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?””
My education, in a small southern public school, included memorizing the Declaration of Independence, The Preamble to the Constitution, & the first 10 Amendments of the Bill of Rights. I naturally assumed she had a similar education.
For someone running for US Senate, I would expect them to recognize the wording of the Bill of Rights, however jumbled. Correcting Coons’ interpretation would have been the thing to do, if possible. I am not impressed.
I have had several replies to my original post. It is interesting & telling than none of them mentioned my contention that public school instruction on Creation is foolish. Everybody wants to talk about the legality of the matter, but no one wants to talk about the wisdom if the idea.