Feather

You're playing word games and evading the question still at this point, fromtheright. You want to argue using your specific, single defintion as though it were correct and none of the others is applicable. That's fine.

It does not mean your argument is correct nor does it mean your opinion has any rational basis.

You've reasserted that "endorsement" does not equate to "establishment." That's fine, too. Even though it's wrong. Your "belief" is no different from asserting that A => B does not imply that not B => not A, simply because you believe a different definition of "not" should be used.

fromtheright

Of course, I assume my definition is right. I'll bet you think yours is right, too. I'm glad it's fine with you. I was worried.

But, I'm sorry, I'm not very good at algebra.

Feather

You miss the point: I don't believe one definition is the definition. It's too restrictive. There is by any estimation an infinite--or at least relatively very large--number of phenomena that we might experience every day--language is much "more finite." The number of words we have can't cover the number of situations and other phenomena that we can observe on a daily basis. So to restrict every word to one, narrow meaning is irrational.

It's not that I believe "my" definition is correct so much as I am quite sure yours is too restrictive--irrationally so--and therefore not correct. "Establishment" has many meanings--try looking at m-w.com for example.

Look up on the same site the phrase "established church:"

a church recognized by law as the official church of a nation or state and supported by civil authority.

If a Judge acting in his official capacity posting rules for a specific religion does not equate to "support by civil authority" in your book, then we are clearly at an impasse. Of course your response will be "but it says the church has to be recognized by law and supported by civil authority; one or the other doesn't cut it."

Never mind that the difference is trivial.

fromtheright

OK, there were different versions of established churches at the time of the Founding. Moore's brick doesn't come close to any of them. Now if you are making a Constitutional point that the phrase in the First Amendment isn't limited to what existed at the time of the Founding, that's fine, I see nothing illogical in arguing that what is proscribed in the First Amendment is equivalents of 18th century religious establishments and not whatever we might now construe as an establishment. Simply because the term might be defined in various ways doesn't put those definitions within the purview of the First Amendment.

Feather

But it is illogical to suppose that the Constitution should be "interpreted" in light of the definitions of words used during the time of its writing. If it were indeed logical to do so, then by the same reasoning every law applying to anything invented or having occurred after even one meaning related to it changed is unconstitutional.

What you are failing to take into account is the fact that the constitution is not a static document. I don't recall even one Federalist Paper that suggests the Constitution was designed to remain forever and eternally as it was originally written. That the Founders included a process for amending the Constitution makes it abundantly clear they never intended for the document to remain the same. That the courts have the implied power to interpret the constitutionality of laws and regulations makes it abundantly clear that the Founders intended for the document to be pliable enough to fit any given modern time.

The Constitution has been modified (Amendments 9, 10, 14) in such a way that the entirety of the constitution applies also to the States and to every citizen in the US. So all that remains is the semantic argument over what "establishment" means.

The Founders weren't dumb. They recognized that no man made institution is permanent. What happens when those "establishments" that existed at the Ratification no longer exist? Does that mean part of the text of the First Amendment no longer applies? How silly.

beejay

Without the 14th Amendment, state-established churches (or other state-controlled religious practices) could probably not be stopped by the Supreme Court.

I see that as one reason why the First Amendment is not in conflict with the practice of some states to establish religion.

Of course, by the time of the 14th Amendment, this establishment had ended.

Grad Student Humanist

Here are Thomas Jefferson's views on the matter, which should be repeated every time some right-winger claims that the Founders' original intent is paramount:

From a letter to James Madison, Paris, September 6, 1789:

"The Whether one generation of men has right to bind another, seems never to have been stated either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society has presented this question to my mind; and that no such obligation can be transmitted I think very capable of proof . . . The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be when he himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society.

* * *

"No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs to the living generation."
----------------------------------------------------------------
As found in Social and Political Philosophy: From Plato to Gandhi, Eds. John Somerville and Ronald E. Santoni. Anchor Books, 1963.

fromtheright

GSH,

And if Jefferson's view on the permanence of constitutions was taken to be the last word, ours would have automatically been tossed out and re-written after nineteen years.


Feather,

You're right that the Constitution wasn't meant to be static, that is why the amendment process was included. And the last time I checked it has not been amended to include the secularist expanded view of what constitutes established religions. If we went with the living Constitution view, then the passions of the hour would determine what is freedom of speech and equality before the law.

An implied power to interpret the Constitution does not imply that the Constitution changes and is fluid, it means that judges apply the wording of the Constitution to the circumstances presented to them and that doens't mean that the Constitution changes. What you suggest implies a nine-member biennial Constitutional Convention. How silly (since you have raised the method of debating by ridicule). And the non-existence of an institution also doesn't imply that we can now hunt for whatever comes close. Because establishments no longer exist that existed then doesn't mean that the definition changes. It is simply the historical reality that the Founding generation incorporated the wisdom against established churches to the point that they were done away with. It doesn't mean that the First Amendment doesn't apply, it means that the institution written of no longer exists.

BTW, I just finished reading Hamburger's Separation of Church and State. Excellent book.

Feather

Fallacy of irrelevence. The meaning of the word at the time of the inception of the Constitution doesn't count in light of the modern era. It's simply not applicable to restrict the words so.

Also words do not have an objective meaning--they mean precisely what they mean in the context of, well, context. And this is not determined by any gods or any one mortal. It is determined by common usage.

Fallacy of the excluded middle. You present two extreme possibilities: that the text in the Constitution plus any Amendments is either completely static and unchangeable; not subject to changing times at all or else it must be discarded every time a new view manifests itself in the public.

What about the middle path, where people, you know, hash this sort of thing out in a debate?


Yes, I haven't argued that this is not the case; I agree.

No, it doesn't, and furthermore I haven't suggested what you suggest I've suggested anyway.

Well, I figured since your favored method is arguments by assertion and from authority that this kind of useless blather might fit in better with your particular abilities and goals. :boohoo:


Playing Devil's Advocate here, so what to do with the text in the First Amendment? Those establishments no longer exist today. Does that mean the sentence in the FA no longer applies at all?

Good heavens, given the Founders' amazing foresight and wisdom regarding the ever-changing face of societies and governments, how did such a myopic set of words ever get included in the document in the first place?

Once again you are merely asserting that only the institutions of the day should be bound to the document. Your reasoning implies we haven't lived under the actual document for decades, really. After all, none of the institutions as they were in the Founders' time actually exist today. Even the Congress is different to a large degree.

Hence your argument is absurd (this is not an ad hominem or an argument from ridicule--I use "absurd" in the same sense one might when proving by induction).

BS. No new "establishment" can be covered under the First Amendment if we used your interpretation because any new "establishment" would not be one that existed in the days of the Founders and those are the ones the FA applies to. It's a necessary consequence of your line of thought here, you know.


:banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

Feather

I think the point in the latest attempt brought to us by fromtheright is that "state-controlled religious practices" are indeed not covered by the Constitution because they are not the same as "state-established churches."

I'm trying to wrap my mind around the double-think involved in coming to such a conclusion, but I can't.

Maybe you can explain it to me better than FTR has been able to.