First Amendment…What First Amendment?

Last updated on: October 20, 2010 at 5:52 pm by Jeffrey L. Falick

First Amendment…What First Amendment? 2010-10-20T17:52:00-05:00 Jeffrey L. Falick

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One of the most hysterical claims of Delaware Senate Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell is that she’s a constitutional scholar. This is based on a seven day seminar she took from some conservative think-tank. She’s been ridiculed in recent days for not understanding the First Amendment. Anderson Cooper covered this yesterday:

Cooper, after playing video of O’Donnell’s opponent explaining the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment, said that O’Donnell was right that the literal phrase “separation of church and state”

does not appear in the Constitution.

“What she got right was the technicality,” Cooper said. “What a lot of people think she missed was everything else.”

It is certainly true that the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution. It originated with Thomas Jefferson in the “Danbury Letter” of 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Throughout American history some have rejected this metaphor, including Justices of the Supreme Court. Like Cooper, I have a hard time believing that O’Donnell was arguing from this point of view, given that she also didn’t know what the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments are. Nobody expects her to memorize the Constitution, but these have been in the news as a result of Republicans suggesting they should be repealed and she has repeatedly held herself out as a Constitutional expert. Here’s Cooper’s report:

There’s also this fool, Minnesota Republican Secretary of State candidate Dan Severson:

“Quite often you hear people say, ‘What about separation of church and state?’ There is no such thing,” Severson told Brandon. “I mean it just does not exist, and it does not exist in America for a purpose, because we are a Christian nation.”

He continued, “We are a nation based on Christian principles and ideals, and those are the things that guarantee our liberties. It is one of those things that is so fundamental to the freedoms that we have that when you begin to restrict our belief and our attestation to our Christian values you begin to restrict our liberties.”

He added, “You simply cannot continue a nation as America without that Christian base of liberty.”

I wish all the good people of Delaware and Minnesota the best of luck keeping these two out of office.

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