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To: LarryLied
However, the way I read the First Amendment, the Sikh majority would have no right to "push" the Sikh religion at a tax-payer supported Government school.

So you believe, as does Ruth Bader Ginsberg, that the constitution is a "living document".

No. I believe that the Founding Fathers said what they meant and they meant what they said.

I believe that having the tax payer funded public schools at the hypothetical New Mexico 75% Sikh majority town you described mandate that a Christian child recite Sikh prayers at school because , in your own words of Post # 172, "They pay for them" is exactly what the Founding Fathers meant to ban when they wrote:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."

To claim, as you did in Post # 164, that "According to the consitution and first amendment, schools can teach or mandate anything they want" is to claim that the Sikh majority in your hypothetical town can Constitutionally mandate that Christian children recite Sikh prayers at that tax payer-supported Government public school.

Such a mandate would:

1. Make the Sikh religion the Government established religion at that New Mexico public school in violation of the First Amendment.

2. Prohibit Christian children from freely exercising their religion by mandating that they violate the First Commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" again in violation of the First Amendment.

3. Substitute the mob rule of pure Democracy for the Constitutional Republic we now have.

In Post # 175, you said it was a "strawman argument" to argue that your position would allow the recitation of the Hail Mary at a Catholic majority public school in Los Angeles. Yet, you now argue that a 75% Sikh population guarantees your hypothetical New Mexico public school the Constitutional right to mandate Sikh prayers and that to disagree with that position is to agree with Ruth Ginsberg.

You are contradicting your own arguments from one post to another.

188 posted on 05/04/2002 12:46:18 PM PDT by Polybius
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To: Polybius
The Founders did not anticipate the 14th amendment. They really believed "Congress shall make no law" only applied to Congress, not the state legislatures. So we are at an impasse. The founders wanted states to do what they cared to do in matters of religion, the 14th amendment negated that. But not at first. Nobody noticed the 14th mandated separation of church and state until over 80 years after it was added to the constitution.
190 posted on 05/11/2002 1:01:39 AM PDT by LarryLied
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