Gostelowe Standard No. 10, c. 1776
Many battle flags of the American Revolution carried religious inscriptions. More examples at the Library of Congress
Posted on 05/02/2002 4:48:32 PM PDT by TaRaRaBoomDeAyGoreLostToday!
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:33:21 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Ignore these pathetic people who's ears, and hearts cannot bear the word "GOD".
No it is not.
Justice Hugo Black, when he was head of membership for the largest Klu Klux Klan cell in the South, made new recruits swear to Separation before they were admitted to the Klan. Black was a nativist and anti-Catholic bigot. When he became a Justice of the Supreme Court, he wrote Separation of Church and State into first amendment law in 1947. The Supreme Court in the last two years has not endorsed Separation , whether holding for religious groups or against them. The US Supreme Court has dropped the Separation metaphor, which was never in the First Amendment anyway. They have not yet replaced it with anything. So we had Separation from about 1947-98, not before and not since.
Jefferson was a Unitarian. In many states his church was supported by state taxes. Church services were held in the House of Representatives until after the Civil War. Our first congress authorized the printing of thousands of Bibles and gave land to missionaries in order to convert Native Americans to Christainity. Jefferson attended a 4 hour communion service at the Treasury Department. Even the chambers of the Supreme Court were used for church services.
"Separation of Church and State" is a recent liberal construct. It has no consitutional basis.
Isn't Professor Frank a typical ratty looking hippy-dippy commissar? A creature right out of Dr. Zhivago. Looks like her boss, Donald Stone, is friends with the Commies at the National Lawyer's Guild.
Come To The NLG Midwest Regional Conference in Iowa
March 1-3, Boyd Law Building, University of IowaFeatured speakers include Leone Bicchieri (National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice), Dan Holub (Director of the University of Iowa Institute for Labor Studies), Nick Johnson (UI Law Professor, and former head of the Federal Communications Commission), Bruce Nestor (President, National Lawyers Guild), Sandra Sanchez (Iowa Immigration Rights Project), Mac Scott (NLG National Student Coordinator), Ahmed Shawki (Editor of the International Socialist Review). Ben Stone (Director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union), Jeffrey Weiss (Education Director of the American Friends Service Committee), Adrienne Wing (UI Law Professor and consultant to the South African Constitutional Committee), and many more . .
Report of the Senate
Fact-Finding Subcommitteee on
Un-American Activities in
California, no. 11, 1961Since our last report is still in print and since this Communist front, organization is described therein at length, we cite our readers who are interested in learning more about this particular organization to our 1959 report at pages 20, 126-135, 137, 144, 197.
It is still extremely active throughout the United States, and has powerful chapters in virtually all of the large cities in California.
Since this organization has long been characterized as Communist-dominated by this Committee and other official agencies, and since it has been cited before the Subversive Activities Control Board in Washington, D.C., virtually all of the members who were attracted to the organization because they believed it was a completely independent liberal organization of attorneys filling a need for a group more liberal than the American Bar Association, quickly withdrew when they discovered the true nature of the control of the National Lawyers Guild leaving a membership of individuals who either didn't care if it were known they were persisting in their membership with a Communist front organization, or whose records of ideological conviction would naturally impel them to gravitate toward such an organization.
Contact information:
The ACLU: Past, Present, and Future
Iowa
Executive Director: Ben Stone
446 Insurance Exchange Bldg.
Des Moines, IA 50309
Phone: (515) 243-3576
E-mail: iclu@radiks.net
Isn'ta it amazing that on a conservative forum there are people saying they think this or that speech should be allowed. My God, we are lost. What they think they want to hear means nothing. What the First Amendment was intended to protect and encourage means everything.
You might be interested in an 1802 letter from Thomas Jefferson to Baptists who were being persecuted because they were not part of the Congregationalist establishment of Connecticut: Jefferson Letter
The 1791 First Amendment says, "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 to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
To me that says keep government out of religion. It also says CFR is clearly unconstitutional. If you use the First Amendment to fight CFR, are you going to ignore the rest of the First Amendment as far as religion is concerned? You practice what religion you want, and I'll practice mine. Keep government (and government schools) out of it.
Better than that, let's stamp out the abomination of government schools altogether so that no faction can use government force to impose their belief system on others against their will. Religion is certainly pervasive enough to survive without government sponsorship. Isn't it? Without government school monopolies the free market would spring into action providing schools to serve the varying needs of the community and nobody would be forced to pay for, or participate in, the promotion of doctrine they oppose. Frankly, I don't see how an honest christian can stand in support of the continuation of government run schools.
To establish a rapport with the Baptists (Jefferson was a Unitarian , a group closely allied with the feared Congregationalists), Jefferson borrowed from the words of Roger Williams, a prominent Baptist preacher:
"When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the Church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made his garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that there fore if He will eer please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world.."
The "wall" metaphor was one directional. The church was to be protected from incursion from the state not the other way around.
This is made evident by the following:
From Affinities and Animosities: Universalists and Unitarians in the Formative Period :
When, in late 1820 and early 1821, Massachusetts went through the exercise of revising its Constitution, the attempt to separate church and state was opposed successfully by the eloquent Daniel Webster, among others. Channing, and a number of other Unitarian ministers, sided with Webster. In an eloquent sermon in December 1820, titled Religion a Social Principle, Channing defended the union of church and state, arguing that religion is not merely a personal matter between God and human beings: ". . .Therefore, Society ought, through its great organ and representative, which is government, as well as by other methods, to pay homage to God, and express its obligation."
Thomas Jefferson wrote on June 22, 1822:The question arises that if Jefferson's Danbury letter does advocate a separation of church and state as some claim it does, what was Jefferson doing proselytizing for and being in a congregation which opposed such a notion?
"I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one God is reviving and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."
Channing was the most prominent Unitarian minister of the day. Jefferson surely knew about the debate which had raged one year before he made the comment above.
A house divided cannot stand.
Gostelowe Standard No. 10, c. 1776
Many battle flags of the American Revolution carried religious inscriptions. More examples at the Library of Congress
I don't think any churches should receive tax money, as your post notes they did in the early 1800s. The fact that Massachusetts churches might have argued to stay on the public dole doesn't make it right or indicate that Jefferson supported that specific action.
Jefferson's Unitarian church may have differed considerably from the Massachusetts Unitarian churches. The three Unitarian churches I've been to in different parts of the country were quite different.
One need only read about the European wars of religion that preceeded the development of our Constitution to see the dangers of state sponsorship of religion. If you didn't belong to the state church, in some places you were in danger of being burned at the stake or prohibited from holding services or having your churches destroyed. Toleration of other religious beliefs or nonbelief was slow in coming and is still hard for some to accept.
Considering that the song is "Woodbine High School’s traditional graduation song" I would assume that they knew that when they joined.
My vote for quote of the day.
The Unitarian church of today has little to do with the Unitarian church of Jefferson's time. If you read Channings sermons, Adams writings, the Jefferson Bible, the works of Priestly,Theophilus Lindsey and other antitrinitarians you will see they were all on the same page. No Buddhists, no wiccans, no atheists wandering the aisles of the Unitarian churches back then. They all considered themselves Christians (many other Christians did not however).
The intent of Jefferson and others was to encourage religion, not limit it. The only restriction was that there would be no Federal church. All the founders agreed that a religious moral citizenry was essential if a democratically elected constitutional republic were to survive. The first amendment was an antitrust act of sorts, the purpose of which was to allow all religions to flourish and be vigorously debated in the public arena.
An analogous system was devised for the states. Federal power would be limited, experiments in democracy would take place in all the states and the best system would be, naturally, copied by others.
Btw... the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic were written by a Unitarian. I doubt a UU of today would pen the words the radical Unitarian feminist Julia Ward Howe did in 1861:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
How can you say that? I simply don't get it. If they wanted separation of church and state, the founders would have put it in the constitution. They didn't. The concept was not written into constitutional law until 1947.
While you, like all of us, have opinion on what should be, to claim there is a constitutional basis for your opinion is simply not the case. You can't take one phrase out of a letter Jefferson wrote and claim it has legal validity. It doesn't. Do you think the letter Jefferson wrote expressing the desire that all Americans become Unitarians has any legal standing? That the government should try to fulfill his wishes and promote Unitarianism? Of course not.
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