(no subject)
Apr. 30th, 2004 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stevenehrbarFYI:
The Founders, as a collective, were not against the state establishment of religion. George Washington himself was a prominent antidisestablishmentarian, who wanted Virginia to maintain the Episcopal Church as the state church. The First Amendment, when enacted, did not bar government establishment of religion. It barred Federal interference in state decisions on the matter. Massachusetts had an established state church all the way out to 1833 (forty years after ratification of the First Amendment), when it was disestablished by in-state action (the Supreme Court that very year ruled that Massachusetts had the right to have a state church).
I'm not saying that church-state interaction is a good idea. I'm merely pointing out that invoking the Founders as an authority against it is ahistorical nonsense.
The Founders, as a collective, were not against the state establishment of religion. George Washington himself was a prominent antidisestablishmentarian, who wanted Virginia to maintain the Episcopal Church as the state church. The First Amendment, when enacted, did not bar government establishment of religion. It barred Federal interference in state decisions on the matter. Massachusetts had an established state church all the way out to 1833 (forty years after ratification of the First Amendment), when it was disestablished by in-state action (the Supreme Court that very year ruled that Massachusetts had the right to have a state church).
I'm not saying that church-state interaction is a good idea. I'm merely pointing out that invoking the Founders as an authority against it is ahistorical nonsense.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-01 11:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-01 10:33 pm (UTC)However, it's not a no-no established by the Founders. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" was not, then, an expression of a principle denouncing the concept of government-established religion. It was just a compromise to assure the states that the federal government would not interfere with their choices.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-03 11:08 am (UTC)I don't think I invoke the founders much, but I'll make sure to keep them out of that one.
I thought women voting was... the 19th Amendment, not the 20th? That's what Schoolhouse Rock says, I think! O:>
no subject
Date: 2004-05-03 11:17 am (UTC)(It was ratified in 1920, which for some reason always makes me forget and call it the 20th.)
no subject
Date: 2004-05-03 01:41 pm (UTC)Oh were were sufferin', before suffrage! Not a woman here could vote no matter what age! Till the Nineteenth Amendment broke down that restrictive ruuuuuuuule! Oh yeah!
no subject
Date: 2004-05-03 02:19 pm (UTC)Except that plenty of women in the U.S. could vote before the 19th Amendment, because the qualification to vote was a matter of state law, and a number granted women's sufferage . . .
[Down, pedantry, down!]
no subject
Date: 2004-05-04 10:10 am (UTC)O:D