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To: daniel1212

Misinterpreted of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment only limits one group of people; The Congress.

Read it:

Amendment I (1791)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Individuals, states, and local governments are not limited. Congress is and Congressmen are not limited from having religious objects or expressing religious opinions. Cities, state governments, and Federal lands and buildings are not prohibited from having the Ten Commandments or a cross or a menorah or a crescent moon and star or manger scene. Prohibiting these are a misinterpretation of the First Amendment.

State and local governments could even specify or ban religions if their constituting documents don’t prohibit it.

Too many people have never read the Constitution and do not know that most of what the Federal Government is doing is not Constitutional.


5 posted on 02/05/2023 4:27:30 PM PST by StrictConstructionist
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To: StrictConstructionist
The First Amendment only limits one group of people; The Congress. Read it: Amendment I (1791) Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Individuals, states, and local governments are not limited. Congress is and Congressmen are not limited from having religious objects or expressing religious opinions. Cities, state governments, and Federal lands and buildings are not prohibited from having the Ten Commandments or a cross or a menorah or a crescent moon and star or manger scene. Prohibiting these are a misinterpretation of the First Amendment. State and local governments could even specify or ban religions if their constituting documents don’t prohibit it. Too many people have never read the Constitution and do not know that most of what the Federal Government is doing is not Constitutional.

Except that - like it or not - the Constitution only authoritatively means why SCOTUS says it does, and as you likely know, it came to apply all the clauses of the First Amendment to the states. Which has been used to both protect religion as well as persecute it,

In 1868, however, the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution, and it prohibited states from denying people “liberty” without “due process.” Since then the U.S. Supreme Court has gradually used the due process clause to apply most of the Bill of Rights to state governments. In particular, from the 1920s to the ’40s the Supreme Court applied all the clauses of the First Amendment to the states. Thus, the First Amendment now covers actions by federal, state, and local governments. The First Amendment also applies to all branches of government, including legislatures, courts, juries, and executive officials and agencies. This includes public employers, public university systems, and public school systems.
The First Amendment, however, applies only to restrictions imposed by the government, since the First and Fourteenth amendments refer only to government action. As a result, if a private employer fires an employee because of the employee’s speech, there is no First Amendment violation. There is likewise no violation if a private university expels a student for what the student said, if a commercial landlord restricts what bumper stickers are sold on the property it owns, or if an Internet service provider refuses to host certain Web sites.- https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment

Except as concerns that latter, if a provider refuses to provide service based on something that gives applicant protected status - which (due to more SCOTUS interpretation) now extends to what gender they ID as - then they can be in trouble.

Here are also excerpts of this analysis:

The Tenth Amendment gives testimony that subsidiary powers are reserved to the states: 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." Certain sovereign powers are delegated to the United States that are prohibited to the states, such as the power to coin money or to make treaties: Article I, Sec- tion 10, Clause 1
the notion was advanced that civil liberty guaran- tees of the Bill of Rights ought to be construed as restraints on state governments as well as on the federal government. This was the contention of the plaintiff in the case of Barron v. Baltimore, decided in 1833. 4... . It was alleged by Barron that the city of Baltimore violated the eminent domain clause of the Fifth Amendment, which declares that private property shall not be taken for public use without just com- pensation.5 In delivering the opinion, Chief Justice Mar- shall felt compelled to declare that the Court had no juris- diction in the case.
More than a century after this pronouncement by Chief Justice Marshall, the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, was construed to make the First Amendment ap- plicable to the states. In the case of Cantwell v. Connecticut,6 decided in 1940, the Court held that the fundamental concept of "liberty," embodied in the Fourteenth Amend- ment, embraces the liberties guaranteed by the First Amend- ment, which declires that Congress shall enact no law re- specting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The Court went on to state that the Four- teenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress to enact laws which will deprive individuals of their liberty without due process of law;
Because the Connecticut statute involved in this case prohibited solicitations of money for religious, charitable, or philanthrophic causes without ap- proval of the secretary of public welfare, and authorized the secretary, upon application of any person in behalf of such cause, to determine if such cause is a religious one or a bomz fide object of charity, of philanthropy, the Court held that the law violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the extent that it authorized a censorship of religion by the secretary through power conferred on him to withhold his approval...
In 1947, the Court looked back over less than a decade, to rulings in which the Fourteenth Amendment had been construed to make the prohibitions of the First Amendment applicable to state action abridging religion.... in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township,' 4 decided February 10, 1947... a tax- payer of New Jersey contending that a New Jersey law amounted to a contribution of public funds in support of a religious establishment... Tending toward the pronouncement of decision in the Everson case the Court said:
... The First Amend- ment requires the state to be a neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and non-believers; it does not require the state to be their adversary. State power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions, than it is to favor them ... The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. New Jersey has not breached it here.
"[as] set forth by John Court- ney, S. J., in A~mcA, February 15, 1947:... Before one can know whether public aid to parochial schools is the enter- ing wedge in the wall of separation of Church and State, one must know where this wall is and what it walls off from 'what . .. There is a constitutional 'wall' between state authority and the religious conscience. There is also a wall between state authority and the parental conscience; it was constitutionally affirmed in the famous Oregon School case, in which the Court denied to the state the right to force parents to send their children to public schools. In general, there is a wall between the areas ruled respectively (and exclusively) by civil authority and religious authority. But the metaphor must not be pressed too far. The Supreme Court of Mississippi (in Chance v. Mississippi . . . ) well said: 'Useful citizenship is a product and servant of both Church and State, and the citizen's freedom must include the right to acknowledge the rights and benefits of each . . . Indeed, the State has made historical acknowledgment and daily legislative admission of a mutual dependence, one upon the other. It is the control of one over the other that our Constitution forbids.' - - https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3880&context=ndlr

And see what I said in post 1. The Founding Father never conceived of a day when the 1st Amendment would be interpreted in a way which results in atheism being effectively fostered (since if the gov. never expresses a need for divine assistance or gratitude to the same, and bans the teaching of even science-bases intelligent design as an alternative hypothesis to godless creation then student are likely to think atheism is the one state-sanctioned belief - and godless creation is indeed a faith), let alone believing you are an animal grants you protected class status as much as race does.

8 posted on 02/05/2023 7:41:55 PM PST by daniel1212 (Turn to the Lord Jesus as a damned+destitute sinner, trust Him who saves, be baptized + follow Him!)
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