SECULARISM, FEDERALISM, INTERDEPENDENCE AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER PART 1
By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
November 11, 2013
NewsWithViews.com
The author of the Supreme Court’s Abington v. Schempp decision (1963) outlawing school prayer wrote that “the state may not establish a ‘religion of secularism’ in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus ‘preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.'” Unfortunately, however, this is exactly what has happened in the United States—the establishment of the “religion of secularism.”
After the Supreme Court’s Abington v. Schempp decision, the High Court in 1965 allowed to stand an Appeals Court’s Stein v. Oshinsky ruling which indicated the state does not even have to permit student-initiated (voluntary) school prayer. This was followed by the Burger Court’s 3-pronged test regarding the Establishment Clause in our Constitution, one of which was that there must be “a secular legislative purpose.” However, this seems to have evolved into the interpretation that the “secular purpose” should be the “only purpose” of any law or action.
For example, some years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Nazis had the “freedom of expression” to march in largely Jewish, Skokie, Illinois, despite the obvious provocative nature of this “free speech.” In 1992, though, the Court held that Rabbi Leslie Gutterman did not have the freedom of speech to say “Thank You, God” at a high school graduation ceremony. The Court went to great pains to rationalize that these were students (though technically they were not, given that they had fulfilled their graduation requirements prior to the ceremony), and had they not been students, the Court would have looked at the matter differently. The Justices’ disingenuousness can be seen here by noting that the same day they handed down this decision (Lee v. Weisman), they also allowed to stand an Appeals Court ruling in favor of the Civil Liberties Union indicating that a judge could not begin his session with non-sectarian prayer, even though the Supreme Court had noted in its earlier Marsh v.Chambers ruling that most courts (including the High Court itself) begin with the invocation “God save the United States and this honorable court.”
The Rest…HERE
