Free Republic

Socialist Elizabeth Warren posted on X that the US Constitution clearly indicates “Muslim civil rights are American civil rights. There is no exception. Hate has no place in America. Islamophobia has no place in America. We will not be silent.” She posted this two weeks after terrorists slaughtered about 1400 Jewish people, mostly civilians. Warren is mistaken on every level. Hate and Islamophobia don’t mean we have to agree with or accept Islamist ideology. Not every Muslim follows the extreme ideology, but if they do, it can in no way co-exist with the US Constitution. We don’t accept female genital...

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.” The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as...

On JANUARY 1, 1802, the people of Cheshire, Massachusetts, sent a giant block of cheese to President Thomas Jefferson, being presented by the famous Baptist preacher, John Leland. John Leland was then invited to preach to the President and Congress in the U.S. Capitol. The subject of his talk was "separation of church and state." Baptists had been particularly persecuted in colonial Virginia, as Francis L. Hawks wrote in Ecclesiastical History (1836): "No dissenters in Virginia experienced for a time harsher treatment than the Baptists ... They were beaten and imprisoned ... Cruelty taxed ingenuity to devise new modes of...

While there are many threats to religious liberty, few are more consequential over the long term than the state’s ever-expanding role in private life. If the government is able to vacuum up tax dollars, create programs large and small for public benefit, and then exclude religious individuals or institutions from those programs, it has functionally created two tiers of citizenship. Secular individuals and institutions enjoy full access to the government they fund, while religious individuals and institutions find themselves funding a government that overtly discriminates against them. That’s the issue the Supreme Court addressed today in Trinity Lutheran Church...

It is an article of faith on the left that a "Wall" separating church and state justifies hounding religion out of the public square. But the federal courts have been backing away from that metaphor. March 11, 2010 may go down as another politically historic day. On that date, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco voted in a 2-1 decision that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional. This surprising verdict from the most overturned federal appeals courts in the nation must have come as a shock to Michael Newdow, who had previously...

A lower court's "hostility" towards Christianity will stand after the U.S. Supreme Court today refused to intervene in a school district's censorship of a kindergartener's choice of literature for a class reading. "By refusing to hear Mrs. Busch's case, the U.S. Supreme Court has endorsed the kind of hostility toward religion that should never be found in an American public school," said John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, which took on the Newtown Square, Pa., case. As WND reported, Donna Busch accepted an invitation to visit her son Wesley's kindergarten classroom at Culbertson Elementary School to read a...

(CBS/AP) The Supreme Court opened its new term Monday refusing to get involved in two church-state disputes - one over religious organizations paying for workers' birth-control health insurance benefits, the other over an evangelical group's plea to hold religious services at a public library. The birth-control benefits dispute was triggered by a New York state law that forces religious-based social service agencies to subsidize contraceptives as part of prescription drug coverage they offer employees. New York is one of 23 states that require employers offering prescription benefits to employees to cover birth control pills as well, the groups say. The...

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris told a religious journal that separation of church and state is "a lie" and God and the nation's founding fathers did not intend the country be "a nation of secular laws." The Florida Republican candidate for U.S. Senate also said that if Christians are not elected, politicians will "legislate sin," including abortion and gay marriage. Harris made the comments - which she clarified Saturday - in the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention, which interviewed political candidates and asked them about religion and their positions on issues. Separation of church...

The current use of the “wall of separation” between church and state as a legal defense for the removal of the expression of American religious culture from governmental institutions and the prohibition of the free exercise of individuals working within them goes contrary not only to the original intent of the Founders and the Framers but also to the religious, political, and legal history and traditions of the United States of America. Courts, county school boards, teachers, and individuals, unwittingly devoid of the knowledge of the substantial role religion (primarily Protestant Christianity) played in the birth and formation of the...

2. ORIGINAL INTENT: THE FRAMERS DID NOT INTEND THE SUPREME COURT TO BE THE ULTIMATE ARBITER OF ALL CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES. The doctrine of original intent holds that the legislature--not the judiciary--is the "predominant" branch5; that the judiciary was the "weakest" of the three branches of government.6 To the Founders, the opinion that the Supreme Court was the ultimate arbiter of all constitutional issues was "never proper,"7 and a "dangerous doctrine"8 which would lead to the judiciary becoming a "despotic branch."9 They were concerned that the federal judiciary would usurp all the powers from the States.10 This was the system of...

America was not founded on the concept of a "wall of separation between church and state," it was founded upon pluralism. The "wall of separation" phrase does not appear in any of our founding documents; it is taken from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson. To base our laws on the correspondence of Jefferson, rather than the Constitution ratified by representatives of each of the original " united states ," is in direct opposition to our system of representative government. Jefferson was a brilliant man, but he also favored slavery and was fanatical about macaroni and cheese. However, slavery was...

Seeing Rosie O’Donnell condemn President Bush just after she “married” her girlfriend, Kelli Carpenter, was bizarre in a tiresome sort of way. O’Donnell claimed, “We were inspired to come here by the sitting president and the vile and vicious and hateful comments he made.”If O’Donnell had any sense of humor or irony, she would look at herself and say, “Gee, for such a tolerant, open-minded person, I sure do condemn and vituperate an awful lot, especially on what should have been the happiest day of my life.”Maybe I’m some sort of pervert, but I don’t recall bearing anyone in the...

1/9/2004, 8:04 p.m. ET LANSING, Mich. (AP) — The wife of presidential candidate John Kerry will be campaigning in Michigan this weekend. Teresa Heinz Kerry plans to visit Saginaw, Grand Rapids and Detroit. While here, she will announce the release of her husband's Agenda for Urban America. Although the candidates themselves are campaigning mostly in Iowa and New Hampshire, the fact that voting has started through the mail and over the Internet in Michigan and that the Feb. 7 caucuses are less than a month away is making the state an important stop for campaign surrogates. Kerry's daughter, Vanessa,...

The recent outcry about the monumental Ten Commandments in an Alabama courthouse illustrates how absurd the controversy about church and state has become. It is difficult to understand how the presence of the commandments might influence what goes on in courtrooms. Judges and lawyers are most unlikely to change their habits and procedures, and criminals, having violated the commandments, will pay little attention to them. Applied logically, the "wall of separation between church and state" should ban military chaplains, the motto "In God We Trust" and prayers before the meetings of both houses of Congress and even of the Supreme...

Attention all school superintendents, principals, teachers, students and parents: The Pledge of Allegiance has been changed. Effective immediately, please use the following text until further notice: “I pledge allegiance to the Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Republic which it controls, one nation, under nobody in particular, with liberty and justice for all (or at least for all who can get five Justices to buy their argument).” That's what it has come to. What are we going to do about it? This issue has been kicking around the federal courts for decades, fueled primarily by ACLU cases...

When opponents of school vouchers and faith-based social services initiatives argue that the Constitution forbids these programs, they often cite, as their authority, a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut. In the letter, Jefferson said that the First Amendment to the Constitution created a “wall of separation between church and state.” Jefferson’s Wall became the law of the land in 1947, when Justice Hugo Black invoked it in Everson v. Board of Education. The Wall, Black said, “must be kept high and impregnable. . . . We could not approve the...