Rising Hegemon
To the Baptist Churches on Neal's Greek on Black Creek, North Carolina I have received, fellow-citizens, your address, approving my objection to the Bill containing a grant of public land to the Baptist Church at Salem Meeting House, Mississippi Territory. Having always regarded the practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, I could not have otherwise discharged my duty on the occasion which presented itself (Letter to Baptist Churches in North Carolina, June 3, 1811).
And that's not the only one.
8 comments:
I do get a giggle out of this tactic. After saying something completely wrong, they suddenly retreat to the rankest sort of pseudosemanticism, by which they argue that because the Constitution does not contain the literal phrase, "separation of church and state," the words actually used can't mean separation of church and state, and then use that bit of sophistry to defend their assertion that separation of church and state isn't in the Constitution.
I'm surprised that O'Donnell hasn't been assaulted by gangs of rhetoricians trying to cut her heart out with a rusty Garden Weasel™.
ooooooooooooo! a rusty garden weasel! how fitting! since there's so very much horse manure to mulch into the soil from the flaccid brained limpbags and open mouth insert nothing cause she's the queen of abstinance and religious rectitude!
i suppose there's some thing in the constitution of la la la where these two dwell that states virginity grows back as cobwebs too!
feral
Four legs good, two legs better. Baaaa.
Madison--isn't he that guy they named that librul state capitol of Wussconsin after? Obviously he was a librul's librul, and don't pack no heat around these parts?
We'll show you librus.
Vox in the Streets, with Rocks.
Funny how their Constitutional originalism always vanishes when confronted with the views of the actual framers of the damned thing (who would have hanged all of today's conservative legal scholars as Tory traitors).
Attaturk - the page of Madison quotes is good. The site itself is a wealth of information on separation. Today I learned a new word to describe the game that Christine O'Donnell and other religious right zealots play when they point out that the phrase "separation of church and state" is not in the constitution. It's "captiousness."
1. Marked by a disposition to find and point out trivial faults: a captious scholar.
2. Intended to entrap or confuse, as in an argument: a captious question.
I found it here alng with a pretty nifty rebuttal of such nonsense:
(T)he phrase "Bill of Rights" has become a convenient term to designate the freedoms guaranteed in the first ten amendments; yet it would be the height of captiousness to argue that the phrase does not appear in the Constitution. Similarly, the right to a fair trial is generally accepted to be a constitutional principle; yet the term "fair trial" is not found in the Constitution. To bring the point even closer to home, who would deny that "religious liberty" is a constitutional principle? Yet that phrase too is not in the Constitution. The universal acceptance which all these terms, including "separation of church and state," have received in America would seem to confirm rather than disparage their reality as basic American democratic principles (pp. 118).
(who would have hanged all of today's conservative legal scholars as Tory traitors)
Following a fair trial of course.
cafeteria patriots.
it must really hurt when their ideology bites them in the ass.
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