Gods of the Supreme Court

“With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.”

From Gods of the Copybook Headings, Rudyard Kipling, 1919

The central message of Rudyard Kipling’s poem is that the basic and unvarying aspects of human nature will always reemerge in every society that becomes complacent and self-indulging.  And so it is with a legal ruling by U.S. District Judge Michael Urbanski that the first four of the commandments be redacted to convey a more secular message. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a student at Narrows High School, in Giles County, VA, who was upset by the display.

In their attempt to eliminate God from the marketplace of ideas, the progressives are, in fact, violating the First Amendment according to their own interpretation of it.  The Supreme Court ruled in Theriault v. Silber, 1978, that the First Amendment was too narrow and should be expanded to include those who have no religious belief:  (1) atheism may be a religion under the establishment clause (Malnak v Yogi, 1977) and (2) secular humanism may be a religion for purposes of the First Amendment (Grove v. Mead School District, 1985).  So, in effect, by requiring four of the commandments to be dropped, they may be imposing their secular humanist / atheistic "beliefs" on others in violation of their own principle of "separation of church and state" (which does not appear in the Constitution, but nonetheless is a principal tenet of liberal progressivism). 

Now all of this is moot anyway, because the Constitution (Amendment I) states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..."  According to Webster's original dictionary (1828) “religion” was defined: "Includes a belief in the being and perfections of God, in the revelation of his will to man, and in man's obligation to obey his commands, in a state of reward and punishment, and in man's accountableness to God; and also true godliness or piety of life, with the practice of all moral duties ... The practice of moral duties without a belief in a divine lawgiver, and without reference to his will or commands, is not religion." [Emphasis mine]  Words form ideas and ideas have consequences ... in this case according to the original meaning of the term "religion" to those who wrote the Constitution, atheism and secular humanism were incorrectly classified in 1978 by the Supreme Court as religion (what else have they gotten wrong?) and therefore have no standing under it (in fact religion was a matter left to the states).

Before liberal readers jump on the federalizing of the 14th Amendment by the Supreme Court in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) to conflate freedom of religion with civil rights, they should read the writings of those who lived at the time of the passage of the 14^th Amendment.  Samuel T. Spear, a respected commentator of that period, wrote (Religion and the State, 1876, p. 224): "the Rule adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States interpreting the [Fourteenth Amendment] ... makes it inapplicable to the religious liberty of any other right of the citizen as determined by the State of which he is resident. The Court in the cases of Paul v. Virginia (8 Wallace, p.36) and of the New Orleans Slaughter-house (16 Wallace, p. 36) laid down the principle ... There is nothing in the last three amendments to the Constitution that reaches the question of religion, and nothing anywhere else in this instrument that places the States under the slightest restraint with reference to this subject; and hence it is true as remarked by Justice Story [one of the Supreme Court's most noted legal scholars, appointed by President James Madison] in his Commentaries on the Constitution (section 1879) that "the whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to the State governments, to be acted upon according to their sense of justice and State constitutions." [Emphasis Added].  The federal government should not even be involved in this debate. 

But then again, progressivism is a political ideology whose ideas are so good they must be mandated. When facts get in the way, ignore them.  When institutions get in the way, abolish them.  When words get in the way, redefine them.   Rudyard Kipling had it right: “They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.”