Recently posted at
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
The New Right v. The Constitution
by Stephen Macedo
Book review by Richard A. Cooper
http://www.banned-books.com/truth-seeker/1994archive/121_1/ts211v.html
[excerpt]
The Reaganite New Right sought a judicial revolution by appointing
judges who subscribe to the New Right's jurisprudence of "judicial
restraint." The New Right's jurisprudence is a device to advance their
political goals and to render their victories permanent. Stephen
Macedo, an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard, challenges
both the New Right and the "selective judicial activism" of the Left
in his important work, The New Right v. The Constitution. He counters
with a "principled judicial activism" on behalf of rights to
individual liberty, both social and economic.
Macedo examines four principles of the New Right's jurisprudence:
"Original Intent," majoritarian democracy, moral skepticism and public
morality. These doctrines receive systematic analysis and refutation.
His principal targets are Attorney General Edwin Meese and Supreme
Court nominee Judge Robert Bork.
Bork's work incorporates all these dogmas. Bork invokes Original
Intent: "The framers' intentions with respect to freedoms are the sole
legitimate premise from which constitutional analysis may proceed."
Bork interprets the Constitution as a charter for majority rule with
only a few specific rights being limits on democracy. "The original
Constitution was devoted primarily to the mechanisms of democratic
choice." Macedo's observation is apt: "When conservatives like Bork
treat rights as islands surrounded by a sea of government powers, they
precisely reverse the view of the Founders as enshrined in the
Constitution, wherein government powers are limited and specified and
rendered as islands surrounded by a sea of individual rights."
[end excedrpt]
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You are invited to check out the following:
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and the discussion group for the above site listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members]
For people in Hampton Roads you are also invited to join
NORFOLK/VA. B. SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE MEETUP GROUP
http://churchandstate.meetup.com/47/
Virginia Chapter Americans United for Separation of Church and State
http://au-va.org/
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.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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