More religious stuff
Dec. 1st, 2004 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumAntonin Scalia, to be frank, is not one of my favorite justices. I think him a hypocrite, in part because he (as well as four other members of that august Bench) made a ruling which went against his lifelong statements of judicial thought in Bush v Gore.
So this little snippet Scalia in shul: State must back religion from the Jerusalem Post, is a humdinger in my book.
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used an appearance at an Orthodox synagogue in New York to assail the notion that the US government should maintain a neutral stance toward religion, saying it has always supported religion and the courts should not try to change that...
Scalia said expunging religion from public life would be bad for America, and that the courts, instead, should come around to most Americans' way of thinking and to the founding fathers' vision for the US. He noted that after a San Francisco court last year barred the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools because it includes the phrase "under God," Congress voted nearly unanimously to condemn the decision and uphold use of the phrase."
So the courts need to, "come around" to the general thinking of the people. Sounds to me as though the ideals he has espoused, in writing, and speaking, for the past umpteen years (that of strict construction, without appeals to the misinderstandings of the present, where people try to trim the sails of the Constitution to the prevailing wind of social desire) is to go out the window.
Where is the noble principle (which he says is almost sacred, and to be overturned only when a clear reading of the facts of the case show previous error) of stare decisis? Not relevant now, I suppose.
And what of the public writings of the Founders? The arguments of the Federalist Papers? No longer relevant in the New World of the approaching court. Nope, "most Americans' way of thinking," is to be the guiding principle on this one.
And which religions shall he favor, when this neutral stance is vacated? Will the Muslim and the Hindu have an equal place with the Catholic and the Jew? Will the Baptist and the Mormon stand on a level with the Quaker and the Pagan?
Perhaps.
The state is not the only thing this seperation protects. When a religion is not treated neutrally, then it is either preferred, or persecuted. We have enough strong feeling here, from the athiest, to the worshippers of Thor and Odin, to the Protestants, to the Tridentines, to... that we can have our very own Thirty Years War. Nothing seems to be so popular as killing people for a mono-theist god, and few people are willing to just be assimilated (even if they are, at the surface, there is always doubt... just ponder the Marranos of Spain) and we will see an inquisition.
Combine this attitude on his part, with the laws meant to make it possible to establish local law on principles derived from admission of "spiritual authority," and the prospect of local theocracies, and the horrors that come with it.
(e.g. Deut: 12 If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the LORD thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying,
13 Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known;
14 Then shalt thou enquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you;
15 Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.
16 And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the LORD thy God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.).
Am I hyperbolic? I hope so. This ranting feels as a jeremiad, and I hope, pray even, that I am not a prophet. I am, however a soldier, and one does not plan for what an opponent will do; for it cannot be known, but rather for what he can do, and the people I worry about, they have said what they wanted to do.
We would do well to listen.
So this little snippet Scalia in shul: State must back religion from the Jerusalem Post, is a humdinger in my book.
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used an appearance at an Orthodox synagogue in New York to assail the notion that the US government should maintain a neutral stance toward religion, saying it has always supported religion and the courts should not try to change that...
Scalia said expunging religion from public life would be bad for America, and that the courts, instead, should come around to most Americans' way of thinking and to the founding fathers' vision for the US. He noted that after a San Francisco court last year barred the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools because it includes the phrase "under God," Congress voted nearly unanimously to condemn the decision and uphold use of the phrase."
So the courts need to, "come around" to the general thinking of the people. Sounds to me as though the ideals he has espoused, in writing, and speaking, for the past umpteen years (that of strict construction, without appeals to the misinderstandings of the present, where people try to trim the sails of the Constitution to the prevailing wind of social desire) is to go out the window.
Where is the noble principle (which he says is almost sacred, and to be overturned only when a clear reading of the facts of the case show previous error) of stare decisis? Not relevant now, I suppose.
And what of the public writings of the Founders? The arguments of the Federalist Papers? No longer relevant in the New World of the approaching court. Nope, "most Americans' way of thinking," is to be the guiding principle on this one.
And which religions shall he favor, when this neutral stance is vacated? Will the Muslim and the Hindu have an equal place with the Catholic and the Jew? Will the Baptist and the Mormon stand on a level with the Quaker and the Pagan?
Perhaps.
The state is not the only thing this seperation protects. When a religion is not treated neutrally, then it is either preferred, or persecuted. We have enough strong feeling here, from the athiest, to the worshippers of Thor and Odin, to the Protestants, to the Tridentines, to... that we can have our very own Thirty Years War. Nothing seems to be so popular as killing people for a mono-theist god, and few people are willing to just be assimilated (even if they are, at the surface, there is always doubt... just ponder the Marranos of Spain) and we will see an inquisition.
Combine this attitude on his part, with the laws meant to make it possible to establish local law on principles derived from admission of "spiritual authority," and the prospect of local theocracies, and the horrors that come with it.
(e.g. Deut: 12 If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the LORD thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying,
13 Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known;
14 Then shalt thou enquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you;
15 Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.
16 And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the LORD thy God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.).
Am I hyperbolic? I hope so. This ranting feels as a jeremiad, and I hope, pray even, that I am not a prophet. I am, however a soldier, and one does not plan for what an opponent will do; for it cannot be known, but rather for what he can do, and the people I worry about, they have said what they wanted to do.
We would do well to listen.
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fundamentals
Date: 2004-12-02 01:59 am (UTC)I do not think there is one person in America who feels comfortable bringing church and state together because of the confessional. That is one heady underground, if the wrong Pope ever chose to use it for a fundamental intelligence database.
On the same respect, the Jew or the Gentile all have a good reason to hope one day along with women of all persuasions that the outline of a US President is not based on race, creed or gender. The age is ok. But ageism and sexism and even bigotry is growing as our economy is tightening.
Hate surrounds the US dollar and the gimme attitude is poor dynamics when we are seeing a warehousing of criminals in the three strikes your out law and the system would perfer to just lock you up than make each University free to the poor and the unemployed and perhaps instil a little socialistic education to bring jobs and people together more instead of Church and state. We need people of all walks of life to decide what we really do profit by ignoring and not cultivating older americans and newly released young orphans at 18 with no jobs and perhaps no hope of a job.
We have people who are young and did not become orphaned at the young ages they did due to a nation's tradgedy, 9/11 and we have sex and age discrimination hard pressed in the military. I could find it today if I chose. We have fat cats who love to brag about how much the lost or how much they made and people who will walk by me if I let them and talk decide it is just to bad, that we are in our situation and call themselves Christians.
I am just amazed at the price it costs this nation to get educated and the worth of the sheepskin at the ivy league school vs the school at home.
People are supposed to help, and teachers do usually have more than one job. We expect them to do more for less while normally parents feel bad about their taxes and their dateless nights and they eat good always at the White House and forget to address the "Poor" at every speech.
You see, the Poor all came from some where. We may not all have addresses but I believe from this day on, any Commander and Chief should begin his state of address with My fellow Americans and the Poor. In that way, if he kept saying that word Poor, he would be able to find some sense of how and what it means to end up poor.
Valuing religion is a good thing. What is bad is when you hear the word church when the ignoramous means synagogue.
Bork (yes, that Bork) has done exactly the same thing
Date: 2004-12-02 01:59 am (UTC)Scalia, the "personally okay with orgies" guy who nevertheless is obliged to uphold the law against his private (eclecticly Catholic) beliefs, is as that shows, a classic sophist in the Russell Kirk school. It's hard to appreciate the level of this branch of academics, its absolute, conscienceless sophistry (my "unprincipled ideallism" unless you are familiar with the "Southern Catholic Intellectual" school which is mostly not Southerners, but full of people who romanticize the Old South like Vermonter Orestes Brownson, an icon to Kirk who was in turn an icon to Reagan, people who read Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor and yet remain oblivious to the wrongs of racism. It is a terribly inbred and weird culture (it is part of the culture from which I come) and I used to think it was an obscure neighborhood in the Conservative Catholic ghetto - with no more influence than that. How wrong I was in those days, simply because no one I met at the liberal Catholic college had heard of any of "our" authors.
It vectors in and out of a few schools - there are less than a dozen in the country - all sharing the same faculty and lineages (in the martial arts sense) and buried ties to big government figures and the Hegemony. Or not so buried - Scalia, like Santorum, is often invited to speak at these schools.
Except that half the writers at Town Hall and all these Heritage Interns have been shaped by Kirk or Kirk's students. They are founding law schools - Tom Monahan, the Dominos Pizza guy, is doing this s part of his Ave Maria University, which also offers "ethical investing" for prolife captialists. Bennett is part of that "Catholic intellectual conservative" mafia, too. This is what gave the Jesuits a bad name, this sort of twistiness.
And what they are about always is justifying their right to maintain power. That's all the high-flown ideals come down to in the end: justify self's position at top of the heap, justify your position at the bottom of the heap so that you accept it, or at least go away confused and doubtful. (Hence that ambiguous praise of "class" vs "classless society" by Kirk, and the praise of self-discipline as queen of the virtues by Bennett. "If it's good for us, it's good for you" might be another way of putting it.)
researching "separation of church & state"
Date: 2004-12-02 06:39 am (UTC)In an 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson, then president, declared that the American people through the First Amendment had erected a "wall of separation between church and state." Before sending the missive, Jefferson had it reviewed by Levi Lincoln, his attorney general. Jefferson told Lincoln he viewed the response as a way of "sowing useful truths and principles among the people, which might germinate and become rooted among their political tenets."
Jefferson's Danbury letter has been cited favorably by the Supreme Court many times. In its 1879 Reynolds v. U.S. decision the high court said Jefferson's observations "may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First] Amendment." In the court's 1947 Everson v. Board of Education decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote, "In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and state.'"
James Madison...said in an 1819 letter, "[T]he number, the industry and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church and state." In an earlier, undated essay (probably early 1800s), Madison wrote, "Strongly guarded...is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States."
It took me five minutes to find this stuff. I presume that
Scalia's law clerks are at least as familiar with Googling --
and I hope that they're more familiar with the Supreme Court
decisions cited above. So Scalia's apparent ignorance of the
above is disingenuous; not surprising, only disappointing.
--Lee Gold, lee.gold@comcast.net
Re: researching "separation of church & state"
Date: 2004-12-02 09:08 am (UTC)TK