In a 6-3 decision on Monday, the Supreme Court said that a Washington state school district had violated the First Amendment rights of a high school football coach when he lost his job after praying at the 50-yard line after games.
“The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.
The court claims that the coach’s prayers were private and protected by the First Amendment, and could not be restricted by the school district, even though the coach lead prayers after the game, meaning players and spectators could join him.
And with the Supreme Court decision – the separation between church and state has been further eroded. Actually, Reuters reports that in three rulings in the past eight weeks, the court has ruled against government officials whose policies and actions were taken to avoid violating the Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on the governmental endorsement of religion, known as “the establishment clause,”
So what is the establishment clause?
The first clause in the Bill of Rights states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” This is why it is referred to as the establishment clause.
“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.”
First Amencment to the U.S. Constitution
In the first 150 years or so of this country’s existence, there was little debate over what, exactly, the establishment clause meant. But as the young country became more diverse, challenges arose to the existing laws and practices, and the Supreme Court was called upon to clarify what the clause meant.
Keep in mind that although not explicitly stated in the First Amendment, the clause is often interpreted to mean that the Constitution requires the separation of church and state.
When I was a child, schools taught us that one reason many people came to the new United States of America was for religious freedom. Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was the first public official to use this metaphor. Williams believed that any government involvement in the church would corrupt the church.
However, it was Thomas Jefferson who engrained the metaphor in our history books. In his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson declared that when the American people adopted the establishment clause they built a “wall of separation between the church and state.”
In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the establishment clause was first applied to the states. The Supreme Court relied on Jefferson’s metaphor in announcing a strict standard of separation between church and state.
The Supreme Court decided that New Jersey had not violated the establishment clause by providing transportation for students attending Catholic parochial schools. The ruling struck several dissenting justices as inconsistent with a wall of strict separation.
Later, in Sherbert v. Verner (1963), the Court held that the free exercise clause required state accommodations for religious exercise, in this case, the need of a Seventh-day Adventist to worship rather than work on Saturdays.
Anyway, ever since the Everson v Board of Education ruling, there has been an ongoing debate over how strictly to apply the wall of separation in particular cases. It is widely understood that the federal government cannot establish a national church.
Supreme Court rulings today
Besides the SCOTUS ruling on Monday that allows a high school football coach to engage in prayer after a game, Reuters mentions several other recent rulings they claim are questionable.
On June 21, the court endorsed taxpayer money paying for students to attend religious schools under a Maine tuition assistance program in rural areas lacking nearby public high schools.
The Conservative justices sided with two Christian families who challenged a Maine tuition assistance program that excluded private religious schools.
On May 2, SCOTUS ruled in favor of a Christian group that sought to fly a flag emblazoned with a cross at Boston city hall under a program aimed at promoting diversity and tolerance among the city’s different communities.
The Supreme Court said that Boston violated the free speech rights of a Christian group by refusing to fly a flag bearing the image of a cross at City Hall as part of a program that let private groups use the flagpole while holding events in the plaza below.
Many people are claiming that the ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court is slowly but surely eroding our First Amendment rights under the establishment clause. I hope I have given a reliable accounting of what has transpired over the past several weeks, and I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not the court is doing harm.
________________________________________________
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
