Much ink has been spilled over the First Amendment’s religious clauses. Separation of church and state, though not even in the Constitution, nor penned by one of the members of the Constitutional Convention, has been the misnomer watchword for those seeking to keep religion on the sidelines in American life.
But now the tables are turned. Those that have long argued for the separation of church and state are now advocating governmental involvement in the church (specifically in choosing ministers), and the case has reached the Supreme Court.
“But the Obama Justice Department has now asked the court to disavow the ministerial exception altogether. This would mean that, in every future case, a court—and not the church—would decide whether the church’s reasons for firing or not hiring a minister were good enough.”
This is an unprecedented reach of federal power. The government has sought to ban religion from the public sphere before, as seen in its ban of prayer from public schools. But to claim the authority to decide the hiring and firing of church officials is a bold step indeed.
Even if one were to mistakenly take the argument of a wall of separation between church and state (this mistake has been addressed elsewhere on this blog), the government is STILL out of bounds.
If the Supreme Court does not uphold the church’s right to conduct her business with her own authority, then we might as well kiss that pillar of the First Amendment good bye, and with it the rest of the textual authority of the Constitution—for if one part of the Constitution can be nullified what is to stop the nullification of the rest?
The Constitution needs to be taken literally, specifically, and adhered to in its entirety. The government we have today is something the Founders could never have imagined.
“…the popular branches of government have expanded their power. The air you breathe, the water you drink, the size of your toilet tank, the water pressure in your shower, the words you can speak under oath and in private, how your physician treats your illness, what your children study in grade school, how fast you can drive your car, and what you can drink before you drive it are all regulated by federal law. Congress has enacted over 4,000 federal crimes and written or authorized over one million pages of laws and regulations. Worse, we are expected by law to understand all of it.” Andrew Napolitano
America must protect all the rights guaranteed in our founding documents in order to assure that our Founding principles continue to shape our free society.
You can help protect those rights by being part of The 1789 Project movement.
