The U.S. Supreme Court (by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia – CC-BY-SA 3.0) Other than the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable government searches, I would argue no other constitutional guarantee is more abused or more intentionally distorted in the modern era than the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause . Before I get to how the Guadalupe School case can help stem this abuse and distortion and hopefully re-establish the value of a functional Establishment Clause, we should delve into the background and current context of the guarantee itself. When our Constitutional framework of religious liberty was first being put into practice , its primary author was clear the purpose was to bring about a “restoration” of religion’s primitive state where its “Teachers depended on the voluntary rewards of their flocks” instead of civil government. Despite this clear prohibition against utilizing civil support for religion (that now applies to the states as well), evidence demonstrates that many of today’s religious institutions have become primarily or substantially dependent on government funds for their operating budgets. Not only is this amount of direct funding of religious organizations by our government an insult to our rule of law, it also represents a direct threat to […]
