[Republic]

...The State surely has a secular interest in regulating the manner in which public schools are conducted. Nothing in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, properly understood, prohibits any such generalized "endorsement" of prayer. I would therefore reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

and

The Establishment Clause did not require government neutrality between religion and irreligion nor did it prohibit the Federal Government from providing nondiscriminatory aid to religion. There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the "wall of separation" that was constitutionalized in Everson.

This good judge got it right! And so has President Bush in his advancement of governmental aid to religious groups serving our nation thru food, shelter, counseling, love and provision of job skill training.

This is one long read...full of historical reasoning as our Bill of Rights and 1st Amendment were authored.

This should be required reading in EVERY government class. It breaths intelligence and common sense.

Thanks for posting this.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[Sacajaweau]

Prior to the Constitution, each of the original states drew up their own Constitution. They can be found at the Avalon Project. Basically, each contains a Bill of Rights in addition to the "Rules of Government" for the individual state. "Free & Independent" states would now be joined under a Federal Constitution.

[Luis Gonzalez]

Far be it for me, an immigrant to these shores, to take issue with such a learned and revered person as William Rehnquist, but there are several things that are not quite right in his dissent, the first of which is attributing the "wall of separation" comment to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson actually borrowed the phrase from Roger Williams, a devout Baptist who organized the government of Rhode Island around the principle of separation of the civil and ecclesiastical powers. The "hasty metaphor" appeared once more in Jefferson’s writings, as well as in the works of James Madison, who in his "Monopolies, Perpetuities, Corporations, Ecclesiastical Endowments" warned of the encroachment of religion into the field of civil government, and pointed to already existing instances: "Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history." -- Source.

I also find the dismissal of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas, the very man whose pen and mind helped author what may yet come to be known as the defining document in the history of man’s rights, based on his absence from the convention, befuddling at best. But then again, knowing that Rehnquist can dismiss Jefferson so off-handedly, helps me feel better about my equally dismissing Judge Rehnquist.

Ideas are no more constrained by geography than they are by time. If Jefferson’s ideas still hold up today, so many years after he first penned "We the People..." how could distance diminish his clarity of thought on the issue of human freedom from every sort of tyranny?

Jefferson’s absence from the Constitutional convention in no way should detract from his contributions to the American experiment; Madison, who worked on the Constitution and was present at the convention, and who drafted the first version of the Bill of Rights, worked intimately with Jefferson on his "Bill For Religious Freedom In Virginia", the defining argument for the separation of Church and State in the newly-founded United States of America, had ideas nearly identical to Jefferson on the subject.

Finally, Jefferson’s "hasty metaphor" appeared one more time, in his letter to the Virginia Baptists in 1808. We may argue as to the exact nature of the definition of "separation", but I believe that upholding that separation keeps both institutions free from the possibility of corruption, and what we should never do, is to dismiss the warnings from those men who engineered the system that enables all of us to debate this point freely, and without fear of repercussions.

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society."

"We have solved ... the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort, which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion, which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries."-- Thomas Jefferson, to the Virginia Baptists (1808).