1) The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment provides for “a wall of separation between church and state,” in the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson. The government cannot deny the right to worship nor can it show preference for one religion over another. Indeed, it is unconstitutional for the government to engage in any religiously sanctioned practice. Government is to be a secular institution. This is clear and unequivocal.
But today’s conservatives argue that the Establishment Clause is meant only to keep government out of religion, and not religion out of government. They believe that religion (and, to be clear, the Christian religion) is both an acceptable and desired source of policy-making. They insist that America is a Christian nation. Of course, if this were true, then America would not be a democracy, but rather a theocracy, much like the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One can currently witness the conservative disregard for the First Amendment when it comes to the Park51 “Ground Zero” mosque. Freedom of religion is not subject to exemptions.
2) Numerous Supreme Court and state court rulings over the last 40 years have confirmed that teaching creationism in public schools is wholly unconstitutional. Yet local school boards, staffed with conservative members and political operatives, from Georgia to Pennsylvania to Kansas to Louisiana continually defy the Constitution by trying to replace the science of evolution with religious creationism.
Conservatives are also motivated to pump their personal politics into our children’s education. In Texas, the state board of education has approved radical changes to public school textbooks, notably writing out Thomas Jefferson because of that whole “separation of church and state” thing, and promoting Joseph McCarthy, the Red Scare Commie Hunter who has been universally vilified in history. Don McLeroy, the unabashed leader of the board, has openly admitted to making the changes in order to promote political conservatism as he sees it.
3) Abortion and reproductive rights for women were affirmed by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade. Yet a woman’s right to choose, as guaranteed to her by the Constitution’s privacy protections, is undermined time and again by social conservatives. The same individuals who decry government intrusion on personal healthcare decisions are more than willing to impose government restrictions when it comes to abortion.
4) Calls to repeal or rewrite the 14th Amendment, which most notably grants citizenship to all persons born in the United States, is the latest example of Conservative Republican disregard for the Constitution. This is the nastiest of turns in the immigration debate currently raging throughout the country.
On the one hand, Republicans say that the amendment was never meant to protect the offspring of illegal immigrants and that the statute has simply been misinterpreted. On the other hand, they say the amendment must be re-written to exclude citizenship rights to those children born to illegal immigrants. The duplicitousness of their argument couldn’t be more evident. The fact that Republicans want the amendment re-written tells us that their argument about it simply being misinterpreted is completely fabricated.
Republicans are playing for political gain here. Changing the 14th Amendment will not solve or even alleviate the immigration problem. It will simply result in an inhumane violation of core American principles.
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So there we have it. The Conservative Republican spin machine convinces the public that they are the defenders of the Constitution. But we can see this is only true so long as the Constitution can be molded and manipulated to suit their political, religious and downright prejudicial views.
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