See Elk Grove.
Freedom of Speech is an individual right.
The establishment clause isn’t. It’s a right that was given to the states. Not to the people.
The Free Exercise clause is the individual right part.
Please, people, stop with the Natural Rights, Natural Law stuff. You get it, but the lawyers, myself included, have no real idea what you’re talking about.
It’s as if you want to understand the law, but find all the little complications too much, and decide to pretend that this Natural Law and Rights stuff is somehow relevant to the law today.
No one seems to touch at all on the the actual law. As it exists now, as it existed in 1947. None of that.
I’m saying that the 1st Amendment allows the teaching of Creationism. I’m not putting some Lemon test out there for that. I’m not concluding that creationism is impermissible.
I’m saying that Everson was wrong.
See Thomas in Elk Grove. Here’s the handy link to the Elk Grove thread I set up yesterday.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2610810/posts - elk grove
Serious conservatives should study Clarence Thomas here. Establishment clause jurisprudence is a mess.
Quite simply, the Establishment Clause is best understood as a federalism provision–it protects state establishments from federal interference but does not protect any individual right.
That’s what Clarence Thomas said. He actually gets to vote on what the Constitution says. What he said is not, technically “law”, because it’s a concurrence, but we want Justices who agree with him, so that he can write a majority opinion on the establishment clause, and overturn Everson.
The STATES have rights now? The STATE has the right for Congress to not pass law respecting the establishment of religion?
To not understand Natural Law is to not understand the philosophical foundation of our Nation.
“This idea? that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.” Ronald Reagan
You don't know what you're talking about. States are nowhere said in the law to posses "rights". States only have "Powers", and only persons have rights.
Cordially,
No it's not. The Establishment Clause prohibits the federal government from creating a state religion.
Go read the Tenth Amendment,
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Federal law trumps state law except in this instance. States are granted power by the Tenth Amendment to introduce laws of their own, which the federal government cannot prohibit. A recent example of that is Arizona's SB1070, the immigration law, based on federal law itself, which the Department of Justice and the White House says is "unconstitutional".