November 1, 2023
A follow-up to some stories I’ve mentioned:
Egypt has opened its border crossing into Gaza, permitting ambulances to carry 76 badly injured Palestinians to Egypt, while 335 people who hold foreign passports were able to cross.
Jonathan Lemire, Nahal Toosi, and Alexander Ward of Politico reported today that the White House suspects Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanhayu’s days in office are numbered.
Here at home, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has scored the House Republicans’ bill to provide $14.3 billion in aid to Israel and to “offset” that spending with $14.3 billion in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). As those of us who have followed the economics of adequately funding the IRS predicted, the CBO found that the cuts to the IRS would cost far more than they save. As it is currently constructed, the bill would add $26.8 billion to the national budget deficit.
New House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tried to spin this information in a way that can only be described as dishonest: “Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit,” he said.
Johnson rejects the separation of church and state in our government, saying that the framers’ idea “clearly did not mean…to keep religion from influencing issues of civil government. To the contrary, it was meant to keep the federal government from impeding the religious practice of citizens. The Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”
Actually, James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had quite a lot to say about why the government and religion must be kept apart.
In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as Virginia arrested itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.
In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which our own Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”
In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
Madison believed that a variety of religious sects would balance each other out, keeping the new nation free of the religious violence of Europe. He drew on that vision explicitly when he envisioned a new political system, expecting that a variety of political expressions would protect the new government. In Federalist #51, he said: “In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”
In order to make sure men had the right of conscience, the First Amendment to the Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”
In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson called this amendment “a wall of separation between Church & State.” In a letter of January 1, 1802, he explained to a group of Baptists from Danbury, Connecticut, how that principle made him refuse to call for national religious days of fasting and thanksgiving in his role as head of the government.
Like Madison, he maintained that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.” “[T]he legitimate powers of government reach actions only,” he wrote, “[and] not [religious] opinions.”
“[T]hat 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,’” he wrote, built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” It prevented him even from such religious practices as declaring a day of fasting in times of trouble, or thanksgiving in times of triumph.
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Notes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67284694
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=628702608614710&set=a.426385065513133
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-01-02-0027
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/virginia-declaration-of-rights
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163#JSMN-01-08-02-0163-fn-0014-ptr
"You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has only one book; and he considers it sacred, but he has never read it." Frederich Nietzsche
Bravo Clearly explains our country’s position on church and state per the founders And cuts the new so called speaker who should know about separation of church and state down to size on his backhanded bill