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First Amendment: “During The Last 4 Years We Have Seen Our President, Elected To Represent The People Of America & Uphold The Constitution & The Laws Of This Land, Ignore His Oath & Rule As A Dictator Removing Our Rights To Liberties That Our Founders Fought & Died For.”
By Pastor Roger Anghis
November 25, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
We have seen our constitutional rights be little by little be either restricted or removed entirely. During the last 4 years we have seen our president, elected to represent the people of America and uphold the Constitution and the laws of this land, ignore his oath and rule a s a dictator removing our rights to liberties that our Founders fought and died for.
We will see more of our rights removed and made void during the next four years because the party that has control of the Senate and the White House have no regard for the document that has made America the envy of the world.
Over the years we have seen our Constitution redefined by the Democrat Party to suit their idea of what America should be. Our Founders believed in personal responsibility and for the right of the individual to prosper as he saw fit. The Democrat Party believes that the common person needs to be taken care of by the government from cradle to grave. The major changes began during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Despite his claim to the contrary Roosevelt was a socialist to the core. His appointments of the Supreme Court show his socialist tendencies. Many of his programs to ‘create jobs’ were overturned by the Court because they did not fall into the constitutional authority of the federal government. He believed that it was the government that created jobs, just as our current president believes. In his years before WW II he was a total failure and his economic advisor even stated that all the spending Roosevelt did had only made the situation worse.
I would like to concentrate this column on what has happened to our First Amendment rights over the years. The First Amendment reads: Congress shall make no law respecting the establishing of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
This Amendment was redefined to mean the exact opposite of what its intent had been mean to understand for the first 156 years of its existence in 1947 in the Everson v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. In my book, Defining America’s Exceptionalism I explained what happened to our First Amendment because of that case: The Everson vs. Board of Education is an important case as it was the case that completely redefined the First Amendment. In David Barton’s book Original Intent, he effectively describes the results of this case: “The question of what the Founders intended as the proper relationship between religious expressions and “public” life (whether in education, law, government, or throughout society in general) is clearly documented in their numerous writings on the subject. Those records establish their intent and thus clarify their two references to religion in the Constitution.
The first reference is in Article VI, Section 3:
[No] religious test shall ever be acquired as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
The second is in the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . .
Through the years, these two constitutional requirements have formed the basis of many judicial decisions. Historically, legal scholars have examined both phrases when seeking the intent of the either; the understanding of each was made more complete through examination of both.12 The goal was always to identify and establish the original context and purpose of those two religious provisos before attempting to apply them.
However, in Everson (1947) the modern Court discarded this objective. It first divorced the First Amendment from its original purpose and then reinterpreted it without regard to either historical context or previous judicial decisions. The result was that the Court abandoned the traditional constitutional meaning of “religion” as a single denomination or system of worship and instead substituted a new “modern” concept which even now remains vague and the Court created a new and foreign purpose for the First Amendment and completely rewrote its scope of protections and prohibitions.”13
From this case we see a complete turnaround concerning the meaning of the First Amendment. This new ‘meaning’ is almost the opposite of what the Founders established. If you ask “How do we know this?” it is simple. The Founders did everyday what the Court today says is unconstitutional. This 1947 misinterpretation has been a cancer to our Constitution and to our rights. At this point I feel that we need to look at historical evidence of the religious grounding of the Founding Fathers. There is a term used in the courts that describes admissible evidence and that term is ‘organic utterances’. This consists of the bulk of historical documents and previous legal rulings which makes up what is known as ‘common law’. We will look at some of these ‘organic utterances’ and see if the Founders were as un-religious as the Courts have declared.
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