Religious Liberty Exec Order

[William Thornton]

[Rvaughn]

[Sandy]

[William Thornton]

It's ultimately a SCOTUS matter. No one is satisfied with everything and there's a lot ahead.

[Sandy]

I keep hearing the terms "originalist" or "strict constructionist" with regard to constitutional interpretation. I think that discerning the perspective of the founding fathers is vital for a court to understand how to rule, but there's a difference between understanding their perspective, and insisting that it be the only consideration. The founding fathers created an amendable document, with a court system designed to interpret it based on the changes in society they knew were coming, and would continue to come.

I doubt many conservative Christians today would want to apply an originalist interpretation to the concept of freedom of religion, based on the perspective of the founding fathers. For virtually all of them, the church was an institution of the state, a place where the walls served as boundaries on the influence of the faith, and as a means of channeling what influence it did have to the benefit of the government, usually the monarchy. The authority of the pulpit stemmed from the licensing of pastors by the magistrate. Few, if any, of the men gathered in Independence Hall in Philadelphia had any idea of what it was like to belong to a "free church," and if you read what many of them wrote about it, Jefferson's idea to abandon a state-endorsed or operated church in favor of a church separated from the state was intended to diminish its influence within the government even further, and not worry about whether or not it could survive without tax dollars. Many didn't.