Re:U.S. Supreme Court keeps ruling barring prosecution for s...
by gamblor956 on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @04:34PM
(#21819129)
Reading "establishment" synonymous with "organization" would be anawkward and un-idomatic even today. Would you call the ACLU a "civil rights establishment?" Would you call NARAL a "women's rights establishment?"
Quite frankly, I don't care what the words mean today, since we have a body of court cases that has expanded the application of the First Amendment beyond the strict scope of the words as they were written.
There are good reasons to believe that's not the sense in which the word is used. The Constitution repeatedly uses the word "establish" in the sense of "to make official."
You keep trying to make linguistic arguments while ignoring the linguistic means of the words at the time they were originally written, especially when one of the men responsible for actually writing the Bill of Rights explicitly stated what the words of the First Amendment were intended to mean at the time they were written.
The First Amendment was explicitly intended to create separation of church and state at the Federal level. Like the rest of the bill of Rights, it wasn't intended to apply to the states at the time, so your arguments about state churches are entirely irrelevant.
Quite frankly, I don't care what the words mean today, since we have a body of court cases that has expanded the application of the First Amendment beyond the strict scope of the words as they were written.
There are good reasons to believe that's not the sense in which the word is used. The Constitution repeatedly uses the word "establish" in the sense of "to make official."
You keep trying to make linguistic arguments while ignoring the linguistic means of the words at the time they were originally written, especially when one of the men responsible for actually writing the Bill of Rights explicitly stated what the words of the First Amendment were intended to mean at the time they were written.
The First Amendment was explicitly intended to create separation of church and state at the Federal level. Like the rest of the bill of Rights, it wasn't intended to apply to the states at the time, so your arguments about state churches are entirely irrelevant.