Embracing Exclusivity: How civic religion at inauguration abridges religious freedom

ReligiousLiberty.TV ^ | 2/04/09 | Michael Newdow

[ReligiousLibertyTV]

In 1892, the 1/8th black Homer Plessy was convicted of violating Louisiana law by sitting in a “Whites only” railroad car. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where his conviction was upheld by an 8-1 margin. “A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races,” wrote the Court, “ … has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races.”

The lone dissenter in that case was Justice John Marshall Harlan, who refused to buy into the majority’s logic. Although it was true that whites and blacks were treated “equally” in a literal sense (since the law prohibited whites from riding in colored cars just as much as the opposite), Justice Harlan focused upon the “real meaning” of the legislation: “that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens.”

It took fifty-eight years for the Supreme Court to recognize that Justice Harlan’s view was correct. In Brown v. Board of Education, the “real meaning” of “separate but equal”– i.e., that the nation’s white majority was using the government to affirm its self-proclaimed racial superiority – was put to an end. As a result, the whole of American society changed, so much so that we now have an African American poised to become the nation’s president. Surely, Barack Obama would never have been elected had Plessy remained the law of the land.

And yet not everyone has learned the lesson of Brown, including, of all people, Barack Obama. The message that “we” in the majority are “better” than some minority to which our Constitution guarantees equality is once again about to be sent.

[caseinpoint]

Yep, atheism is the new "colored". I'll buy that. Newdow is an idiot. Among other things, a whole lot of blacks are not happy with the extent to which other races and interest groups like women, handicapped and gays have tried to put on the civil rights mantle of Martin Luther King Jr. This will just tick them off more.