Will Roberts bring down Jefferson's wall? (CC Haynes)

Charles C. Haynes


We don't know exactly where the chief justice nominee John Roberts stands on the separation of church and state under the establishment clause of the First Amendment -- and his confirmation hearings haven't shed much light on the question.

But strong hints from past memos and briefs suggest that the nominee's views on church-state relations are very close to those of the man he is about to replace, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. By itself, that won't change much. But Roberts plus one -- the replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- could add up to a radical redefinition of religious freedom in the United States.

To win at the Supreme Court you must be able to count to five. In key 5-4 church-state rulings by the Court over the past two decades, O'Connor provided that critical swing vote. Although the outcome in some of those cases (notably school vouchers) angered strict separationists, her reasoning in all of them was rooted in a firm commitment to maintaining what Thomas Jefferson famously described as a "wall of separation between church and state." O'Connor drew the line at government endorsement of religion. And she consistently warned that any direct funding of religion by government was a serious violation of religious liberty. <snip>

"The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history," <Rehnquist> wrote in 1985, "a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned." <snip>

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comes down the wolf can get over it both ways.

We shouldn't forget that we put it up there for good reason.

The damage was done in 2000. This is simply fallout. Get used to it. It's completely fucked -- but there you have it.

.. by George the Appointed or his minions is something we should simply "get used to" since it's all a done deal?

The moralists used to call such an attitude "Sloth" and reckoned it among the deadly sins.

I'm not a moralist, perhaps not even much of an optimist, but I have absolutely no respect for defeatism.

I recommend to you instead the attitude of Frederick Douglass:

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

thanks for the reminder.