:|
:|"Jon Beaver" <jbeaver@NO.com> wrote in message
:|news:bm85v017gjmrr9asjf2gluaqg6inf68fa2@4ax.com...
:| > If there was ever a time for nut cases like Newdow, it's when we have
:|> nut cases trying to divide our country along religious lines to get
:|> political power.
:|>
:|> - Jon Beaver
:|
:|Newdow is a man of intellect and achievement who holds a degree in medicine
:|and a degree in law. I'd say he's smarter than you are, Jon. Other than
:|his lawsuits what could possibly make one question his mental health?
:|Which makes we wonder: If he had filed these lawsuits before he was
:|licensed would the bar have goose-egged him with a character and fitness
:|sham? Would the bar have refused to license him? I suspect so.
:|
:|He's definitely not a kook. Many people who feel themselves shunned and
:|disrespected as second-class citizens because they are not Christian
:|identify with him. I do. A sense of divisiveness and despair prevails when
:|the government endorses a specific religion, particularly when the
:|Constitution and caselaw guarantee that it cannot. Consequently, if I walk
:|into a courtroom with the King James Bible's Ten Commandments posted on the
:|wall by the judge*, I don't feel like I would get a fair shake in that
:|courtroom, especially if the officials there are aware of my agnosticism.
:|If I were a party in such a courtroom, the first thing I would do is file an
:|appropriate motion. Just my perception but I see where religion is toxic,
:|and its toxicity is aggravated by its official presence in officialdom.
:|And I do always wonder if the religious are not telling me when they enlist
:|the government to post their religion in so many ways in public places, such
:|as in the pledge, on the coinage, and in such public displays as in
:|courtrooms, in oaths and inaugurations that I am not entitled to the
:|privileges and immunities guaranteed to them. And that they are
:|affirmatively telling me so.
:|
:|Of course, these considerations, less toxic than others though they may be,
:|are a few of the complex reasons for the Establishment Clause, which must be
:|acknowledged to enjoy priority since it appears in the First Amendment
:|before the Free Exercise Clause. Surely no one could say that the
:|immediate fathers of the Constitution like Madison and Jefferson didn't have
:|a reason for placing the Establishment Clause at the very forefront of the
:|Amendment.
:|
:|Thank goodness always for Madison's and Jefferson's private comments about
:|the subject. Otherwise, we freethinkers and skeptics might have it even
:|worse than we already do. What if Jefferson's _Letters to the Baptists_
:|and Madison's _Memorial and Remonstrance_ had not survived. What if those
:|writings shedding the most illuminating brightness on the First Amendment
:|had been shredded and annihilated? Perish the thought.
:|
:|I am sorry that you are unable to see that what Newdow is doing is good for
:|the country, good for everyone, including the ignorant Christian who doesn't
:|realize what damage it does for government to side with the majority on
:|matters religious when it should be firmly and expressly neutral. *There's
:|a courtroom just 30 miles from where I live with the indisputably religious,
:|establishment-clause- violating ten commandments on the wall. An atheist
:|tried to have them removed and a federal judge crawled up trees backwards
:|and the Fourth Circuit did a song and a dance routine, refusing to rule on
:|the merits, until the atheist died, rendering his lawsuit moot. They knew
:|he had prostate cancer and was dying so they just sat back and waited until
:|he drew his last breath, then dismissed the lawsuit. Screw the great
:|commission --- it is not an instrument of good; it is an instrument of the
:|devil. (If there were one.)
:|