My reply to anonymous on the separation of church and state

Commentor anonymous on my post on the constitutionality of school prayer, with my commentary:

What you don't seem to understand is that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are supposed to be beyond the normal legislative process.

I understand that. My critique is that the Establishment clause does not ban voluntary religious expression in government or in schools.

Your constant bleating about how Doug can go and get a legislator to make a law to function that way Doug says the law operates is flawed in two ways.

First off, he doesn't have to. The law works the way he says it does. A century of jurisprudence that you dismiss with a wave of your hand is on his side in this.

Establishment clause jurisprudence is a garbage heap of self-contradiction and non-sequiturs. We can't post a small prayer on a school wall, but we can have "In God We Trust" on every dollar bill printed and religious passages posted on National Monuments across the country. A school teacher can't lead a voluntary prayer in school, but the President can ask Americans to pray for our troops and God to bless America. Establishment clause jurisprudence is junk law, just like Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson and Buck v Bell and Roe v Wade are junk law. A mistake repeated for a (half) century isn't any less a mistake.

And this isn't going to change any time soon. You're engaged in revisionism and your historical and legal scholarship is so weak and shoddy that one wonders if you got your arguments from a pack of bubble gum cards.

Yea. What role would an American citizen have in American government? We have to leave it to rabid atheists to tell us what our Constitution says.

Second, just as we don't vote on things like whether your home can be subjected to a search without a warrant, or whether you are entitled to due process of law, we don't vote on the Establishment clause.

Banning religious expression in schools and government isn't required by the Establishment clause. The Establishment clause bans an Establishment of religion-- a National Church. Offering a voluntary prayer to a class in a public school does not Establish a National Church. And banning voluntary prayer violates the Free Exercise clause. Ya know, the clause you never mention.

Mouthing "democracy" is not a get out of jail free card for your arguments.

Why would an atheist use a metaphor about "jail" to refer to people who affirm the right to free exercise of religion? A Freudian slip, comrade?

We live in a limited democracy in which certain issues have been determined to be beyond the legislative process.

Appropriate insulation of the use of government force (which you advocate) from the legislative process must be based on the Constitution, which your "separation of church and state" is not.

To push the argument back at you, if you want the Constitution to work the way you think it should, there is a process for doing that - it is called Amendment.

Here's an Amendment: "The Establishment clause shall be enforced according to what it says".

If your ideas concerning how religion should be wedged into the public sphere are as wildly popular as you seem to think they are, you should have no trouble getting the Establishment clause amended forthwith.

Americans want the Establishment clause interpreted rationally and enforced, not amended.

But I doubt it. I think that if you tried, it would just expose what a lunatic fringe you sit on.

An lunatic fringe atheist brownshirt-- who thinks that a student leading a voluntary prayer at a school graduation creates an Official National Religion that violates federal law-- calls three-quarters of the American public who believe in free exercise of religion "a lunatic fringe."

Pretty funny.