States & Their Rights

A masterpiece of "180° wrong on the First Amendment" reactionary thought, ripped from the pages of The American Spectator, as typed by one (&, we hope, the only) George Neumayr, a professional Catholic ([E]editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.) yet.

Neumayr's papismconstitutional scholarship has led him to conclude that the First Amendment means only that the Feds need not inquire when any state decides to burn a mosque or otherwise enforce a religious preference.

Such pitiful reliance upon mindless cliché and bogus First Amendment jurisprudence renders public officials useless in the face of dangerous stupidity.

(We must pause to ask. The above sentence: As pleasurable to type as it was painful to read? Yeesh.)

The truth is that the First Amendment protects neither the Ground Zero mosque nor Jones's burning of copies of the Koran. How do we know this? Because under the real First Amendment, the one written by the Founding Fathers, local communities within states were perfectly free to pass laws prohibiting the construction of particular religious buildings or pass laws that banned book burnings.

The plot of National Treasure III revealed to us? "169 years ago, the Bilderbergers hid the REAL First Amendment! Now, Nicolas Cage wants to find it!"

Six of the thirteen states that signed the Constitution ran established churches. It is a historical fact that the First Amendment was written not to suppress those state churches but to protect them. Those six states would have never signed the Constitution otherwise. They insisted on the language, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," to make clear that the federal government had no right to establish its own religion and disestablish theirs. The wall of separation in the Constitution is not between government and religion but between the federal government and the states' religious activities.

We're no Constitutional scholar (Nor, we suspect, is Mr. Neumayr, & to be forthright, we're not even a "scholar.") or lawyer, but this goes beyond ordinary Bizarro World, "Shut up, that's why!" opposition to anything allegedly liberal & enters a parallel & imaginary universe where judicial activism is unheard of, judges serving strictly to preserve the Constitution, unchanged from the wisdom of its Founders.

The notion that the First Amendment requires individual states to treat all religious believers equally was invented out of thin air by judicial activists. For decades after the Constitution was written, several states baldly preferred one religion over another. As author M. Stanton Evans has written, "there remained a network of religious requirements for public office -- typically, that one be a professing Christian of orthodox persuasion. Such requirements existed in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas. For example, the state of Vermont, one of the more liberal states of the era (admitted to the Union in 1791) required the following oath of office: 'I do believe in one God, the Creator and Governor of the Universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration and own and profess the Protestant religion.'"

All well & good, but it leaves us hanging. Does M. Stanton Evans go on w/ what happened after those post-Constitutional decades of bald religious preference? Would Neumayr have us believe that at some point in time (now lost in revised reactionary history) pre-Marx Marxist judges shoved the "real" Constitution in the back of the junk drawer, whence it was pushed out by the addition of more junk, fell down the back of the cabinet, & was lost to real history? And nobody noticed? 150+ yrs. of judicial wrong-think have rendered America helpless in the face of the minority.

The rejection of the real Constitution for the phony "living" one explains today's tyranny of the minority. That tyranny has assumed ironically divergent forms in recent days. In New York City, a majority stands aghast as a group of Muslims tries to build a mosque within blocks of the World Trade Center ruins. In Florida, the majority stands appalled but idle before the pastor of a tiny church who launches an "International Burn-a-Koran Day." Both incidents are, in varying degrees, acts of gross and pointless incivility that do not truly enjoy constitutional protections, but all public officials can mumble in the face of them is the cliché du jour that Americans have a "right to be wrong."

Now we're completely lost. The happened-in-the-parallel-universe approach works if one assumes there have been, at least in Neumayr's mind, "incidents" (Has anything actually happened, besides blather & argle-bargle? The planning & discussion of a building project now constitute an "incident?" Or is reactionary outrage alone now an "incident?") The comparison of a majority (Of?) "standing aghast" & "standing appalled but idle" is where we started to wonder where the hell we were. By the time we noticed "do not truly enjoy constitutional protections" we were wishing we'd left some markers along the trail; George's magical forest can addle the strongest of minds, let alone the tee vee & Internet-sapped brain w/ which we're working.

And in conclusion, Mr. Neumayr would like to issue a gratuitous bitch-slap or two.

The planned burning of copies of the Koran is a gratuitously stupid and ugly act, one which will mirror radical Islam's violence not illuminate it. But it is also dumb for the U.S. government to elevate the aberrant event's significance. Why are Hillary Clinton and company even talking about it? Jones is the pastor of a church with 50 members. He should be ignored. Instead, the Obama administration and the media, both desperately looking around for evidence of "Islamophobia," continue to build him up, thereby prolonging an Islamic outcry that will endanger U.S. troops.

Take that, America-hating libs! He knows what you're really up to! The exact opposite of what you say. General Petraeus didn't stir the pot looking for "Islamophobia," did he? Well?

Elements of Style©: The reasoned, objective, civil, non-buzz phrase argument. Examples: "foolish and false," "pitiful reliance upon mindless cliché and bogus First Amendment jurisprudence," "invented out of thin air by judicial activists," & of course "Ground Zero mosque." Twice.

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