An article in last week's issue of the New Yorker displays that periodical's current malaise. David Denby discusses Thomas Aikenhead, a student at the University of Edinburgh who was hung for publicly rejecting essential Christian dogmas in 1697. Denby goes through a few of Aikenhead's proclamations and then comes up with this startling, nay, just plain idiotic, remark:
The student’s last statement—that moral laws are the work of governments and men—is one of the assumptions behind the American Revolution.
While I would be the first to condemn some of the Englightenment ideas underlying the American Revolution, Mr. Denby could not possibly make this statement unless he has little or no knowledge of the Declaration of Independence. The whole goshdarned point of the Declaration is that moral laws are not the work of governments but instead they are "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God."
One wonders what Denby would make if he ever decided to give a gander to the founding document of the regime under which he lives and writes, and found the assertion that God endows Mankind with "inherent and inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." One might argue Denby's ignorance is due to a general proclivity to relegate knowledge of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution to middle school.
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Today in my 'Monarchy, Church, and State' seminar, I remarked that a few U.S. states had their own established churches well into the 1800's. Dr. Bradley made the quite innocent mistake of remarking that this was interesting since it's in contrast to the Constitution which "has such a clear seperation between Church and State."
Now, Dr. Bradley is easily forgiven for not having much knowledge of the Constitution of a country not his own. But Americans ought to know that Seperation of Church and State is nowhere mentioned in the United States Constitution. One can argue about whether or not there ought to be seperation between the two – there are cogent arguments for both sides – but the fact remains that the concept is completely and wholly absent from our Constitution.
What the First Amendment does do, among other things, is prevent the Federal Government (and only the Federal Government) from making laws which 1) establish a religion or 2) prevent the free exercise of religion. We must remember that establishment is a technical term. It means an arrangement similar to that of the Church of England and Church of Scotland here in the United Kingdom. And not being allowed to make laws preventing the free excersise of religion is pretty clear enough.
Elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution, it says that those powers neither granted to the Federal Government nor denied to the States by the Constitution are reserved respectively to the States. Thus, individual states are free to have established churches or religions, as Massachusetts and Connecticut did after the ratification of the Constitution. And if, tommorrow, the state legislature of Vermont with the approval of the Governor decided to establish the Congregational Church as the official religion of Vermont, the Supreme Court of the United States couldn't legally do a damned thing about.
Of course, though the Supreme Court of the U.S. couldn't legally do a damned thing about it, it still could do something illegally. Namely, it could hear an appeal and decide that Vermont's establishment of Congregationalism was unconstitutional. Of course, as anyone who can read the U.S. Constituion ought to be able to deduce, they would be completely incorrect in stating this. Thus their ruling would be completely null and void, and Vermont could carry on its merry little way. In reality, however, Vermont would probably heed the illegitimate ruling.
Therein lies the problem. A court makes rulings which the Constitution states it has no right to make, and the parties involved obey such rulings. Hopefully sometime within the next decade, this conflict will come to the fore, and some state (probably Southern) will attempt to set things right. I'm not saying any state should establish a church (arguably, the establishment of religion is inappropriate in the United States). But nonetheless, I don't see why we have a Constitution if we don't plan on running the government according to it. Of course, all the Democratic Party and a third of the GOP would disagree with me.
Yet another reason, perhaps one of the best reasons, to vote for President Bush in Novemeber is that with Bush there's at least a chance that constitutionalist judges will be appointed to the Supreme Court. Sadly, Senator Kerry and the Democratic Party are so enamored with abortion which – right or wrong – also has no defense in the U.S. Constitution, that there is zero chance of Kerry appointing constitutionalist judges. Abortion law is most certainly reserved to the States, despite the Court of the 1970's inventing a "Right to Privacy" which it believed encompassed the "right" to commit prenatal infanticide. No one who supports the current Constitution of the United States can really support Senator Kerry.
For those who don't know St Andrews, I've provided a
little map at right. The West Sands is a long stretch of beach that is
about a mile and a half long down the coast from the town of St Andrews
to Out Head.
Almost like comparing the City of New York to the New York Times, the Sun is more colorful, less pretentious, loves America, and is a million times more interesting. The only way the Times is more like New York than the Sun is that the Times is so big you can never get through all of it at once.
