The First Amendement, Part One

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

“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.”

Central to the principals of American Freedom is allegiance to the Constitution. Our elected officials must, to assume office, fulfill a requirement to swear an oath to defend and support the Constitution. Our trust as a nation is placed in the word of law and not the word of a leader. Even the military, under direct orders from the President, have sworn to defend the Constitution as their primary mission and to obey the orders of the President only if his orders do not conflict with that.

The founding fathers added the amendments in order of their importance to the cause of liberty. Therefore, the first amendment must possess the highest degree of importance for the well being of the Republic. This amendment covers a wide area of freedoms that had historically been denied to the common citizen and governmental retribution for the infraction of laws surrounding religion, speech and free assembly had been traditionally, swift and brutal. It was critical to secure the high ideals that this new nation was to represent, that these rights were guarded as aggressively as they had previously been denied. Given the importance of this amendment, we will address each of the clauses individually over the next three days.

The most misunderstood of these principals is the first. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The modern incarnation of this passage is the separation of Church and State. The men who founded our nation were statesmen, lawyers, businessmen, land owners and tradesmen. They were also openly religious and sought to secure the blessings of God on this nation by recognizing his divine word that man was and ought to be, free.

Many of the early settlers to this new continent came here to seek the freedom of religious expression; a freedom denied to them by the Church of England. The founding fathers celebrated their beliefs openly but recognized that belief assumes many forms. That all men should have the comfort of worshiping in the faith of their choice, free from coercion, free from ridicule and free from reprisal. To that end, they established language in the form of a Constitutional Amendment that would prohibit the United States from establishing a “State Religion” similar to the Church of England.

That was meant to allow all citizens to worship in their own way. Unfortunately, modern man brings modern thought into the discussion. Public schools once began each day with a prayer. Atheists saw this as the establishment of religion and bombarded the courts with suits claiming that the freedom of religion, or non-religion, was being trampled on by this practice. Reading the letter of the law, the courts had no alternative but to agree and remove the mandates of prayer from public schools. However, the courts, as usual, went too far and the separation of “Church and State” slowly became the separation of “Church from State”, prohibiting any public display of religion. In essence, it has been mutated to say “freedom from religion” instead of the word of law which is “freedom of religion”.

Remember that the intention was to allow the free worship of God, each in his own way. Now we have adopted a policy where school children that choose to pray are prohibited from doing so in public places. That any public display that acknowledges the faith of the American people is abolished and that public monies can not be used to assist charities and community organizations that are operated by religious organizations. This was never the intent of the First Amendment. I do not believe that the government should endorse one religion over another but it has the obligation to recognize the faith of all of its citizens. It should not lead a school in prayer but neither should it prevent those that wish to pray from doing so. It should not celebrate one religious event over another but it should celebrate the freedom with which American’s celebrate these events for themselves.

I could go to the extreme and point out that by the definition posted in the New Merriam-Webster Dictionary that progressivism meets three of the four definitions given to describe religion and is therefore logically, a religion itself. While progressivism is primarily a political frame of mind the believers in this ideology also eagerly point out the morality of the goals in their political aims. It is dangerous for one to assume that their morality is superior to all others, just as it is dangerous to claim that one religion is superior over another.

Following the logic of the modern Supreme Court and all of the opponents of public displays of religion I would submit that the endorsement and display of progressive ideology be equally expunged from all public venues. That the Congressional Progressive Caucus should be disbanded and a full accounting of the public funds used to support it be made known to the American people and that progressive organizations should also be prohibited from receiving public funding.

We can go down the list of the groups and ideologies, both left and right, that have had a strangle hold on the governmental process and apply this equally among them. In the end, once we weed out the political groups that pursue their aims with “religious” fervor, we will eventually end up with public support for only a small group of individuals that look very much like the men that founded this country; those that would seek justice for all and posses a keen recognition of individual liberties and freedoms.

Hmmm….Sounds like a great idea! Let’s found a nation based on those principals!

Tomorrow: Part two of the First Amendment. Freedom speech and freedom of the press.”

Paul

The Declaration of Independence

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security….


By the time these extraordinary words were drafted, the colonies of the American States had effectively been at war with Great Britain for over a year. The “Seven Years War” (1754–1763), which some considered to be the real “first world war” because of the multitude of European nations that were involved, had strained England’s finances and placed the British government deeply in debt. Previous attempts to raise additional taxes in England had resulted in violent protests and were therefore, out of the question. In an attempt to restore solvency to the treasury and to cover the costs of keeping military forces in the American colonies, Britain imposed a number of taxes on the colonies rather than risk further dissent in England.

The first tax enacted after the Seven Years War was the Sugar Act of 1764 (a modification of the Molasses Act of 1733). The Molasses Act places a 6 pence tax per gallon on molasses imported into Great Britain. The Sugar Act taxed Molasses imported to the Americas from the British West Indies at the rate of 3 pence per gallon.

Stamp Act of 1765 required that a tax stamp be purchased and affixed to most printed materials. The act was met with resistance and violent protests in the colonies. Many of the agents responsible for selling the required stamps were intimidated into resigning their commission as the local population began to join in protests instigated by the Son’s of Liberty. The Stamp Act was also met with resistance from British merchants and manufacturers that exported to the colonies. There trade was being threatened by the economic problems in the colonies that the tax had only worsened; as a result, the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766.

In 1765, Parliament also enacted the Quartering Act. This Act stated that British troops stationed in the colonies would be housed in barracks and public houses. If the number of troops stationed in a particular area outnumbered the available military accommodation, the act permitted that the troops would be housed in a variety of structures including inns, stables, outbuildings, taverns, etc. and that the owners of those establishments would be required to provide food, bedding and other necessities without compensation. New York refused to cooperate with this act and the troops that arrived there remained quartered on board their ships. For their insolence, Parliament suspended the Province of New York's Governor and legislature in 1767 and 1769. In 1771, the New York Assembly acquiesced and allocated funds for the quartering of the British troops.

Since the colonies had reacted so violently to the imposed taxes and other acts, the British Parliament enacted the Declaratory Act in 1766 in an attempt to restrain the behavior of the colonies. The act declared that Parliament had the right to make laws for the colonies in all matters. Unlike the British colonies in other parts of the world, the American colonists, for the most part, had either emigrated from England or at the very least, were direct descendents of Englishmen. The notion that they could be taxed without having representation in Parliament did not sit well in the America’s since the British Constitution prevented Parliament from exacting taxes without the consent of the governed in England proper. Clearly, England did not recognize that this provision of law applied to English subjects living in the colonial states.

Even after the disaster of the Stamp Act, Parliament enacted the Townshend Acts in 1767. The Townsend Acts were as series of five different laws whose intent was to raise revenue in the colonies to pay for governors and judges independent of colonial control, to create a more effective means of enforcing compliance with trade regulations, to punish the province of New York for failing to comply with the 1765 Quartering Act, and to establish the precedent that the British Parliament had the right to tax the colonies regardless of Parliamentary representation. By 1768 matters had deteriorated so badly that the British Military had occupied Boston and by 1770, The Boston Massacre had forever dimmed the hopes that reconciliation with England was possible.

Although reconciliation was unlikely, the loyalists living in the colonies had sent several letters pleading for Parliament to intercede and asking that the American colonies be granted the same rights and privileges afforded to all Englishmen residing within Great Britain. All attempts to illicit assistance from Parliament were rebuffed and the colonies were declared to be in revolution with the members of the Continental Congress branded as traitors to the Crown. In April of 1775, the battles of Lexington and Concord signaled the earnest beginning of the war of revolution and by June of that year, Congress had passed a resolution formally creating the Continental Army.

Of course you know that on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. Had the colonies not won the war with England, the Declaration would have no more importance that any other piece of paper but with the eventual assistance of France, Spain and the Dutch Republic, the Continental Army prevailed and accepted the surrender of the British military forces in 1783 and secured the future of this fledgling nation.

These were not the wanton acts of lawless barbarians. These were decent and good men that were denied the right to live as subjects of the British Crown with the same privileges enjoyed by all other Britons. The acts of oppression employed by the Army of Great Britain and the British Parliament that were meant to strangle the colonies into submission served only to fuel the fires if dissent. The Declaration of Independence was drafted to serve as an honorable statement of their intentions. It was to be a legal notice that the colonies were in fact, separate and apart from Great Britain and would continue the armed conflict to enforce that separation. The Declaration listed the offenses and atrocities committed against the people of the colonies and served as their lawful justification for the revolution that was already under way.

These were people that were not fighting to be free; they were fighting because they were already free. Freedom was a right that they strongly believed was granted to them by a mighty and just God. Their freedoms were not a proclamation of Congress or the whim of a benevolent King, but a divine right that had always existed. These beliefs would guide them in the work that lay ahead in drafting the most profound document human hands had ever created; The Constitution of the United States of America. The Constitution would embody the essence of every struggle mankind had faced to live freely and without fear. The first ten amendments to the Constitution could easily be seen as a brief list of those struggles and the righteous solutions to them.

Please join me tomorrow as we begin to explore the Constitution of The United States of America.

Paul