Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

A person does not need to be an American history professor, a Supreme Court Justice nor even a Constitutional law student to know and understand some very clear and basic truths, prior to the bias and sinful nature of men and women perverting and corrupting words, history and the truth.

I’m none of the above professions or students, but I do know enough American history, enough about our Founders, enough about where they came from, and why they wrote as they did. Every American ought to know the same things.

What is always removed from this discussion, as in almost every discussion, are more facts, more background, and more truth in order to understand the how, why, what, where, when and who.

But you see, people if we’re going to begin telling the truth don’t really want to venture down the road of truth and understanding. We’re a nation, a world of chronic liars, of which we lie we are not. We are an ignorant and lost people for our refusing to think. To take the time to learn and know the history the reason behind the words and what the words actually mean. We tend to always muddy, complicate, and expound volumes and millions of words in attempting to understand one, three, or a handful.

Does this not reveal something very telling and true about the heart of men and women and what and who they are permitting to control them as they vehemently espouse their rights, independence, and individualism while appearing no different than any other ignorant person held captive by the world?

Our Founders, still colonists under British rule as they began painstakingly, thoughtfully patiently laying the words to our founding documents knew more clearly in their day and what was likely to happen in the future than most folks in the present know what’s going on in the present, clueless and devoid of history and what occurred in the past and why, and existing in some ethereal fog of delusion about what the future will bring.

The British Empire in the 1700s, while a monarchy, was in truth dominated and ruled by the Church of England. The Church of England was the ESTABLISHED church and religion of England since the reign of Henry VIII in the 1500s. Even the most casual and ambivalent person walking about today ought to know at least a few bits about that king, that time, and the beginning of the Church of England’s establishment.

The Chruch of England was as a hand is to glove in the monarchy and in all the affairs of state. To be considered more of a Homeland Security, Central Intelligence Agency than a holy body of truly devout disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. Established from the long history of England’s attachment to the church of Rome, with the Roman form of Christianity being present in England beginning in the third century A.D. Old habits are hard to break, and due to wantonness, lust, and corruption, the Chruch of England was begun by Henry VIII in breaking from Rome.

The period from Henry to King George III and the time of the colonies and men such as Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and Franklin living in those colonies is as long a period in history as the existence of America. I write this to reinforce just how ingrained the Church of England was in every aspect of governance.

Our Founders knew not only the abuses of the monarchy, but also the abuses and power wielded by the Chruch of England, and all one has to do is pause, and truly understand which most living today in America don’t, and that is our Founders created three distinct and separate governmental bodies in the formation of America not only to avoid a king, a despot, a dictator but also to keep one powerful agency from dominating, holding sway and influence over all else.

Contrary to the out-and-out lies, misinformation, and misunderstanding of so many today our Founders were not all Deists, nor anti-Christian, anti-church. Most were the exact opposite. They know though that the ESTABLISHMENT of a STATE SANCTIONED CHURCH, having nothing to do with Christianity and only about wielding power and how corrupt the Church of England had become — had no place in the newly created, or being worked out as to its foundations for government, America.

What those few words mean in the First Amendment are that Congress shall not convene and decide to make the church of Rome, or the Mormon church, or the Baptist church the sole religious agency in the land. Thus giving that body power that surely would corrupt. Just as it had from its beginnings in England. Something conceived and brought forth from corruption, from a desire to have and keep hold of power over people has at its root evil, not righteousness, when brought about or maintained by men and women, for men and women have nothing but evil within their hearts and minds if they are absent from the grace and salvation afforded by their faith in, obedience to, and their being transformed by the Supernatural power of the Spirit of God to change their hearts and make them into renewed of mind and spirit creatures. Desiring to please and serve the Lord rather than accumulate and hold on to worldly power.

Let’s be clear, shall we? Let’s begin to think. To reason. To use the brains the Good Lord blessed us with. For our understanding of not only words and history without corrupting them to suit our present purposes, but in then speaking and writing and living our lives accordingly.

This nation was founded on Biblical, Godly, Christian truths and principles. NOT on the foundations or dictates of any manmade entity, or church denomination. A clear distinction. One that should not so easily escape the understanding or minds of the overwhelming majority of people in this lost land as that fact does.

How can anyone that is an American not understand this? Really.

While most now vehemently, vocally, and violently oppose God, the Bible, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Christianity this certainly was not what our Founders framed and had bled, died, and worked so dedicatedly to get the words right, the history right for the people to follow.

This is progress? We’re now a greater nation than we were 200 years ago? 100 years ago? 60 years ago when prayer was not only permitted but offered up to God in schools for the thankfulness of His blessing on our land, our people, when the Bible was read and taught — and believed?

Think people. Really, truly begin to think. There’s a reason God put that mass of gray matter in each skull, a heart in each body, and a conscience. Use it. Or lose it. For eternity. Except for the consciousness of the sin and error of our ways unless we truly repent, truly turn to the Lord, truly live as and understand not only what it means to be an American, but most importantly what it means to be a true disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, a true child of God.

We are but pilgrims on this earth, sojourners with our citizenship in heaven, not of or on this earth, but that does not mean we allow ignorance to prevail, evil to increase, lies to become ingrained as truth, which they never truly can be and we permit people to live lives of myth and delusion.

Which is where we are. Because we the people have been remiss and absent in our living the truly Christian lives we ought to be living in this land.

In many ways our being no different than the Israelites. God’s chosen people. Given so many promises and blessings if only they would obey. Follow God’s statutes and instructions. They would inherit a land unlike any other and be so richly blessed! Read Numbers, Deuteronomy, and other neglected books of the Bible. And the people always said they would obey, that they understood, that they loved the Lord and would follow His instruction. Only to continually, constantly rebel and do whatever they pleased. Prone to idol worship. False gods. Paganism. Even sacrificing their children to Baal and Moloch and all that was detestable to God.

Always saying one thing while doing the exact opposite and then acting all surprised and upset and angry at God when they disobeyed, rebelled, went against His Word, and had to face the consequences.

There is no new thing under the sun.

The evil hearts and minds of men and women, human nature has never changed one bit. Most serve Satan. Serve lies. Serve this world. Serve themselves.

Few submit, commit and repent to live pleasing and acceptable unto the Lord truly making Jesus Lord of their lives and the Word of God the foundation of their daily lives.

Forget world history.

Think of eternities history for those two distinct and opposite kinds of people, and those are the only two kinds of people on this earth.

Hearing the words. Most ignore them, remaining foolish and ignorant. Many corrupting the words to suit their vain and evil purposes.

Few understanding the words, even reading the words and living to live accordingly.

Imagine that.

Yet so many bite, gnash, gnaw, wail, shriek, scream, and rant in anger wondering why things are as they are? Really?

Ken Pullen, A CROOKED PATH, Tuesday, June 28th, 2022

SCOTUS Expands 1st Amendment Right to Religious Freedom

Strikes down the law that discriminates against religious schools.

Monday, June 27, 2022

By Joseph Klein

Reprinted from FrontPageMag

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued several momentous decisions in the past week. One of the rulings struck down Maine’s state tuition subsidy program as a violation of the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religious beliefs. Another ruling struck down New York’s law strictly limiting the carrying of concealed guns for self-defense outside of the home as a violation of the Second Amendment. On June 24^th, the Supreme Court overturned the fifty-year Roe v. Wade precedent that had created a constitutional “right” to an abortion out of whole cloth.

Looking at these decisions in a broader context, they evidence a consistent strict constructionist approach to interpreting the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority looks to what is actually written in the Constitution’s text and its history, where relevant, rather than trying to impose the justices’ own policy views on what they think the Constitution should say. The religious freedom and gun rights decisions are rooted in the explicit provisions of the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, respectively. Roe v. Wade, on the other hand, grafted a manufactured “right” onto the Constitution without any clear textual or relevant historical foundation.

This article will focus on the Supreme Court’s religious freedom decision in Carson v. Makin. The decision reinforced the enumerated constitutional right to the free exercise of religious beliefs, which is explicitly set forth in the text of the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court ruled on June 21^st that Maine’s tuition subsidy program for students in school districts that neither operate a secondary public school of their own nor contract with a particular school in another district is unconstitutional. By a 6-3 vote, the conservative majority held that the program violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The program denies parents who send their children living in these districts to private religious schools the same financial benefits that parents who send their children to private secular schools are entitled to receive.

In short, the state of Maine stacked the deck against families of faith.

“The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “That is discrimination against religion.”

Chief Justice Roberts concluded his opinion by writing that “Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.”

The Supreme Court majority decision dismissed the notion that honoring parental school choice in the use of Maine’s tuition funding to pay the cost of sending their children to private religious schools violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that “a neutral benefit program in which public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients does not offend the Establishment Clause.”

The three liberal justices – Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan – not surprisingly dissented.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Breyer disagreed with how the majority interpreted the application of the Establishment Clause to this case.

According to Justice Breyer, “state neutrality in respect to the teaching of the practice of religion lies at the heart” of the Establishment Clause. “The Establishment Clause was intended to keep the State out of this area,” he wrote.

Justice Breyer objected to the majority’s reliance on the Free Exercise Clause to strike down Maine’s decision to deny state funding to those parents who want to send their children to private religious schools, not private secular schools.

“Nothing in our Free Exercise Clause cases compels Maine to give tuition aid to private schools that will use the funds to provide a religious education,” Justice Breyer wrote.

Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion that “it is irrational for this Court to hold that the Free Exercise Clause bars Maine from giving money to parents to fund the only type of education the State may provide consistent with the Establishment Clause: a religiously neutral one.”

The dissenters have it wrong. While the Establishment Clause prohibits governments from compelling or endorsing a religious belief, preferring one religion over another, or entangling themselves unduly in religious matters, the Establishment Clause does not mandate that governments be hostile to people of faith in the public domain.

If parents can choose whether to send their children to a public school in their own school district or to a private school, the parents should bear the financial consequences for choosing a private school. That would be true whether the private school provides religious instruction or not.

This case is different, however. Maine’s government officials have deprived parents of the opportunity to send their children to public schools in certain districts where they live because, as a result of governmental decisions, there are no suitable public schools in those districts. Maine tried to solve this problem with a workaround – a tuition taxpayer funded subsidy program that pays the tuition of the private school chosen by the parents for their children.

The constitutional problem for Maine’s tuition program is that it was not neutral either in its design or implementation. Not all parents needing financial help to send their children to private schools as a result of the failure by Maine’s government officials to build any age-appropriate public schools in the children’s districts have been treated the same. Maine’s tuition program discriminated against parents of faith by precluding them from receiving any public subsidies altogether if they chose a private religious school for their children’s education instead of a private secular school.

As Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “there is nothing neutral about Maine’s program.” Quoting from a prior Supreme Court opinion, he explained that “a state need not subsidize private education” but “once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

With her usual hyperbole, Justice Sotomayor wrote that the Court’s majority “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build.”

President Thomas Jefferson is often quoted by those who want to build an impenetrable wall between church and state. He wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists dated January 1, 1802, in which he said, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

The expression “building a wall of separation between Church & State” appears nowhere in the Constitution itself. To use it for the purpose of interpreting the Establishment Clause, the expression needs to be examined in its historical context to understand what President Jefferson was talking about.

The Danbury Baptists had written to President Jefferson expressing their concern that “religion is considered as the first object of legislation; and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the state) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights.”

The Congregational Church was the established church in Connecticut at the time. Other denominations, including the Baptists, could only set up their own churches with the approval of a justice of the peace. The Congregational Church basically ran Connecticut’s educational system.

President Jefferson sought to assure the Danbury Baptists that he would not do anything as president to impose his will on how the Danbury Baptists or any other religious sect decided to practice their religious beliefs. That was the purpose of his letter.

In an earlier draft of the letter, President Jefferson was even more explicit as to his intentions. He first wrote that “confining myself therefore to the duties of my station, which are merely temporal, be assured that your religious rights shall never be infringed by any act of mine.” After reflection, he wrote in the final version of the letter simply that he would adhere to the “expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience…”

In short, Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state was meant to prevent government control of religious beliefs or religious control of governments’ decisions and actions. It was not meant to be used as a pretext for governmental hostility to all religions and people of faith in administering what are supposed to be generally available government benefit programs.

The Constitution’s text and historical underpinnings are what matters when interpreting the Constitution, not what a justice would like it to say based on the justice’s own personal value preferences and desired public policy outcomes. Today’s Supreme Court majority is adhering to this fundamental principle.