Judge Roy Moore and the Myth of the Separation Clause

Chief Justice Roy Moore’s new book So Help Me God is a captivating and unflinching first-hand account of a man on the front lines of the battle between religious freedom and judicial tyranny. This Alabama Supreme Court Justice embodies the true definition of patriotism, inasmuch he has risked his career and reputation to stand by his oath of office and refuses to deny his allegiance to the Constitution and the laws of nature and nature’s God for the mere sake of catering to the frenetic, deep-seated anti-religious paranoia of the uber-secular left.

It was on June 9, 1993 that ACLU member Joel Sogol wrote to then-chief justice of Alabama Sonny Hornsby, threatening to sue anyone who continued the time-honored tradition of praying in court. After Roy Moore took office in 1994 and refused to bring a halt to the tradition, the ACLU stepped up their threats of suit over the prayer and, in addition, began hyperventilating over the Ten Commandments plaque Justice Moore had placed in his courtroom. At the beginning of the third month of Justice Moore’s first term of office on March 31, 1995, the ACLU filed suit in U.S. district court against him on the basis that he had illegally imposed his religious beliefs on others in the courtroom, denouncing the prayer as “a religious test.”

The ACLU apparently didn’t feel up to suing all 550 members of Congress and all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who have always begun their daily proceedings with prayers. It may even be a sobering revelation to them that our very first president noted in his inaugural address, “no people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.” Nevertheless, it is doubtful that such words would bear much significance to a pathetic, subversive gang of rogue lawyers who have nothing better to do with their time than to bully public officials out of acknowledging their creator and to throw childish temper tantrums over harmless little plaques.

In a priceless act of civil disobedience, Justice Moore erected a 2½-ton granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the State Judicial Building. Moore would later write in his book that “[t]he display of God’s law was not done to make any bold statement, to intimidate or offend anyone, or to push any particular religion. It was simply a reminder that this country was established on a particular God and His divine, revealed laws; it reflected the Christian faith of our founders.”

Flabbergasted, on Halloween 2001, the ACLU ganged up with Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Southern Poverty Law Center to file suit over the monument. Demonstrating what loving people liberals can be, in a letter to the legal director of Americans United, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to Justice Moore as a “religious nut in partnership with a fanatical church.” (And showing how smart liberals can be, the letter was accidentally sent to Justice Moore’s attorney, Steve Melchior. Whoops!)

The case was set for trial on October 15, 2002. Less than a month after it ended, on November 18, 2002, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled against the Ten Commandments display, declaring it unconstitutional. In his ruling, Judge Myron stated: “[W]hile the Chief Justice is free to keep whatever religious beliefs he chooses, the state may not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Judeo-Christian God and attribute to that God our religious freedom.” Perhaps Judge Myron would be compelled to rethink his words if he actually bothered to read the Alabama State Constitution which Moore had sworn specifically to uphold, inasmuch as it reads in the preamble: “We, the people of the State of Alabama, in order to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish the following Constitution and form of government for the State of Alabama” (emphasis added).

On March 2, 2005, the New York Times expressed its disapproval of similar displays in between the Capitol and the State Supreme Court in Texas, and in county courthouses in Kentucky, accusing the displays’ backers of not accepting the “separation of church and state” while explaining that “[t]he Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making laws respecting an establishment of a religion.” If nothing else, at least these circumstances have given liberals yet another excuse to evince their maniacal infatuation with the “separation of church and state,” a phrase which we are supposed to believe is somewhere in the Constitution.

If a liberal sneezed and you said “God bless you” he would begin spastically whining about the “separation of church and state.” To appreciate this situation from the perspective of the judicial supremacists, the ACLU lawyers and the New York Times editors, we will just have to pretend for a moment that a) the “separation of church and state” exists in the Constitution, b) Congress is somehow responsible for the placement of the Ten Commandments monuments, and c) the monuments in effect represent an establishment of a state religion.

To the contrary, however, the left’s beloved “separation of church and state” mantra originated not in the Constitution, but in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 (11 years after the First Amendment was incorporated into the Constitution) regarding their concerns that the Congregationalists may abuse their power to attain a favored position. Explicitly, Jefferson wrote: “[the] wall of separation between church and state…is a one-directional wall. It keeps the government from running the church, but makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.”

The self-styled progressive elites have typically justified their anti-Christian bigotry by insinuating that religion must stay away from government, and any case in which it does not is an irrevocable step towards theocracy. Their interpretation of the language of the First Amendment demonstrates how little understanding they have of its actual implications.

By including the establishment clause in the Constitution, the framers were preventing the prospects of theocracy such as that which the Pilgrims purportedly fled from in England before settling on the North American shores. However, there is a reason why Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (emphasis added). What Jefferson was taking into account was the imperative necessity of our leaders and authorities to recognize their inferiority to the divine laws of the solar system and their subordinance to a Higher Power, so as not to confuse themselves with that Higher Power and in due course assume a despotic, tyrannical precedence.

The functionality of our democracy is contingent upon the Hobbesian doctrine that man is inherently corrupt and therefore in need of some degree of governmental supervision. The notion of human fallibility is quintessential of the Judeo-Christian doctrines with which our founders specifically harmonized their vision of a free republic. The acknowledgement of that fallible nature is what distinguishes our system from communism – a system which presupposes that man is basically good, and therefore capable of upholding and preserving a utopian, Edinic society. It distinguishes our system as well from that of monarchism and fascism, both of which presuppose that there is such a thing as Divine Right, or human infallibility; that it is possible for a human leader to take on a godlike authority over his people and govern them in a flawless manner. But because our system recognizes that there is no such thing as human infallibility, our branches of power are balanced, and our leaders are appointed through a democratic process by which the majority of citizens decide who gets to represent them, and for how long.

Secularist liberals tend to accuse Christians of seeing things too much in “black and white,” yet they themselves have adopted a black and white perspective by declining to consider the fact that not everything boils down to the two options of theocracy and secularism. A system of government that is religious in nature does not automatically take on the form of theocracy. It does not mean that its subjects must be coerced into submission to a certain designated religious faith. Whether or not we as individuals decide to subject ourselves to personal dependence on religion, we must recognize that our freedom to do so or not do so at our own will is dependent on our democratic system, and our democratic system is dependent on religion.

It is on account of this brand of narcissistic judicial hubris, this denial of subordinance to a Higher Law that an innocent woman was allowed to be inhumanly starved to death recently, that activist judges have been able to recklessly redefine the institution of marriage, and that an unremitting fetal holocaust has been sanctioned by the highest levels of government for 32 years and counting. The more we forget that we are “one nation under God,” the more we will become “one nation under the State.” If this becomes the case, then our rights will become conditional and susceptible to abuse, rather than God-given and immune to meddling. As many could argue, resting our rights solely on the state is like building a house on sand. (Note to liberals: Please pardon the biblical reference.)

In doing so, we must be extra vigilant that we not dismantle any freedoms we already have in defending those that are under attack.

You have your version of freedom. I have mine. Freedom of movement. Why? Do we need the right only to be able to seek economic opportunity in other places or so we can get a taste of a different climate or topography? Is that all there is to it?

From the very beginning, we were a nation that was made up of people who voted with their feet. Each of us has our own hierarchy about what, which of all of the values on the huge menu of life are most important to us. The concept is so ingrained in us, when people complain too loudly about something we remind them they have the right to move. Sometimes we'll even offer to help them pack. There's the door. Don't let it hit you in the ...

From the beginning of the European incursion into American, people voted with their feet to live in communities in line with their beliefs, even if it meant that they had to build those communities themselves from scratch.

About half of the Pilgrims were "Separatists", while the rest were not. The Separatist Pilgrims had found their religious freedom in Holland, but there was something else there which they found that left the location wanting. Rather than staying in Holland & working to convert their Dutch countrymen to be more English, they voted with their feet. They risked death crossing an ocean & were willing to suffer the hardships of scratching out their ideal community from wilderness. The non-Seperatist Pilgrims had more secular reasons for leaving England. The ideals of the two groups weren't in conflict, so they joined together.

Different people, from different places, with different ideals did the same thing in wave after wave, each group finding or building a place in line with what they were seeking. It worked for generations. It worked for different, sometimes differing religious beliefs. Each group found a place. It survived revolution & was built into the law of the land.

As mobility became easier, when people could actually vote with their feet with greater & greater ease, something started happening. A cry to create a right to "just in case"... I might want to live elsewhere & if I do, I don't want to have to put up with having the ideals of those other people inflicted upon me. Never mind that the community you were moving into had worked for the people who were living there, had settled there had worked for them, sometimes for many generations. The children of those generations also had voted with their feet if they disagreed with the communities their parents had settled.

But the just in case people wanted to vote not with their feet. Instead, they wanted everywhere to have a watered down version with mixed "universal" appeal, so they no longer had to vote with their feet. They began to demand that government remake all of the communities in the country to a homogenized version of what had made the place. In the process, they took away the ability of others to have or make a community they wanted to live in.

Freedom of movement lost most of it's meaning. Y'all can move, but your primary reason to do so is no longer relevant. You will be taxed to teach children things which may be contrary to your beliefs. You can kinda vote with your feet by putting your children into private school or you can teach them at home with the "state" looking over your shoulder, but you still have to pay the taxes to support secular humanist schools, even if 100% of the parents in the school district have the same religious beliefs. It became important to stop people like those stuffy old Puritans from passing down their beliefs to their children in the way that previous generations had, because what they had been doing no longer fit with the new improved thinking.

Anything smacking of religion had to be pulled out of all public schools, off of all public property, out of all local governments, as we had to protect "just in case" people & "hind end voting" people against any feet voting people's idiosyncrasies, especially if they were religion based.

Might be time to see if the feet work again, but most people will have to seek it outside of the United States, because real religious freedom, freedom of association or the basic principle as to why that has any meaning is getting pushed out of the country in the name of "expanding" freedoms. Men made as their own gods is the dogma that stole the right to worship as one wills, free from any government intrusion.

When you can make yourself unhappy, just knowing that there is some community half way across the country that has rules that are less enlightened than you think they should be, think about why. Maybe you're afraid that those nutty, fringe ideas might migrate over to where you are, so they must be dealt with by building walls of laws around them, to contain them.

Why has the push from the religious right been directed at the Federal government? Imagine empowering feet voters again, regardless of their ideologies.

But government never was the source of ethical clarity in America! It is the people.

Amen!

I don't think I could convince 100 people to my particular religious views, much less enough to demand a government on any level do it for me.

Then why do you argue in favor of permitting the use the power of state official conduct, state property, and explicitly religious laws to express them? You may not be the one demanding that of government, but if you deny others from monitoring government excesses in these areas, then your religious views might be violated in the future. If you can ignore the vestiges of religious establishment that violate others' beliefs then yours may be next.

The problem is that you can't have it both ways. You can't have a government that doesn't violate someone's religious views and expresses yours, or someone's with whom you personally have no disagreements.

Anyway, we're going around in circles now. I've appreciated having your viewpoint, and having the opportunity to express mine to those of you here like you who have really tried to understand my point of view and who have really tried to show me yours.

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