The Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Roy Moore – a guy you would expect to know something about the Constitution, given his job – says the First Amendment protects only Christians.
Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.
“They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship,” he continued. “Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”
Games? What games would those be? The First Amendment says what it says, not something else. I didn’t make that up. I’m not playing games.
Roy Moore? Meet the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
See there? It doesn’t say Christian or Christianity. It says “of religion.” That would include Buddhism and Islam, whatever Roy Moore may choose to tell the fetus-huggers of Mississippi.
e then noted that he loves talking to lawyers, because he is a lawyer who went to “a secular law school,” so he knows that “in the law, [talking about God] just isn’t politically correct.” He claimed that this is why America has “lost its way,” and that he would be publishing a pamphlet “this week, maybe next” that contained copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, thereby proving that all the people “who found this nation — black, white, all people, all religions, all faiths” knew that America was “about God.”
All religions, all faiths? But you just said – oh never mind.
Well, this is Roy “the Ten Commandments Judge” Moore we’re talking about. The guy who was previously unanimously removed as Chief Justice for defying a federal court order.
“Black, white, all people….”
Do you think Roy will edit out the parts of the Constitution about most black people counting as 3/5 of a person?
Costco — his dad was an alumnus, so that helped.
“All religions, all faiths” mean “all the sects of Christianity.
This guy is a joke.
Selecting state Supreme Court justices by statewide popular election is a terrible, terrible idea.
Give the voters a retention vote on judges, so they can remove bad ones, but don’t let them choose who gets to be a judge.
The funny thing- in a debate on Facebook over this, someone raised some notes from the drafting debates for the First Amendment, citing a proposal to explicitly restrict religious freedom to Christians.
This person thought that proved that’s what the amendment meant, but- this wasn’t a “hey, here’s an idea for something to do” proposal where they had to work out the final wording- this *was* the final wording. The framers did think of the possibility of making the First Amendment explicitly Christian, they had a specific proposal to do so, and they chose not to.
That seems to be a pretty clear sign of intent to protect the religious freedoms of non-Christians to me.
To argue that the First Amendment was meant only to protect Christians religious freedom is to argue that the Framers were hopelessly incompetent. Given that the country they put together mostly works close to 240 years later, I’m pretty confident in ruling out the hopeless incompetence theory.
It’s a misreading to say that slaves counted as 3/5 of a person before the Thirteenth Amendment. They counted as zero. Slaves weren’t people; they were property. What the 3/5 compromise did was give white Southerners extra seats in the House based on the existence of that kind of property. Legally, it was exactly the same as if the Northern states had been given extra seats based on the railroad cars in their states.
I think many people believe that the Pilgrims wrote the Constitution.
There’s an odd thing about the Puritans that most Christian nationalists overlook. I’m not talking about the fact that they were superstitious bigots. For most fundamentalists, that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s the documents that they like to quote with their explicitly religious, theocratic language, such as the Mayflower Compact. These are the founding documents of the colonies and therefore of America, they tell us. They’re right on half of that. These are the founding documents of the colonies, but they are not the founding documents of the United States. The colonial governments are the governments that the revolutionary generation overthrew. Almost all of the colonies formed new governments and wrote new constitutions during or soon after the Revolution. Even where the old charters were kept, earlier documents are only valid in those states. The Mayflower Compact has nothing to do with Alabama.
Moore’s logic is: the Mayflower Compact was a founding document of the Plymouth Colony; the Plymouth Colony became part of Massachusetts; Massachusetts was one of the first United States; Alabama is one of the United States; therefore, the Mayflower Compact is one of the founding documents of Alabama and has legal relevance there. Transfer the setting from the United States to the European Union. Solon’s law code was a founding document of Classical Athens; Classical Athens became part of Greece; Greece was one of the first countries in the European Union; Finland is one of the countries in the European Unions; therefore, Solon’s law code is one of the founding documents of Finland and has legal relevance there.
If that’s not good enough for you, here’s a video of a hamster eating tiny burritos.
WAL MART would sell better law schooling than that. It wouldn’t be great, by any means, but it’d be inexpensive, basic, and effective.
I’m not a huge fan of WAL MART by any means but WAL MART and Costco are much better than Roy Moore at what they do.
Oh FFS! I honestly did not realize people that stupid could get that far in life! How did this man make through grammar school, nevermind highschool, university and law school? What the is in the water down there?
The signers of the Mayflower Compact were a small number of men. Many man did not sign and many, of course, women and children couldn’t sign.
There is a doctoral discussion for a PhD, that lines out exactly who died in that first winter of starvation. A couple of signers’ children died, but the signers, their wives and none other of the signers’ children died. It was the outsiders that died in droves. Quite Christian of the Signers of the Mayflower Compact to seize and allot the food to theirs and not those dreaded others.
The others would have had a better chance of surviving by escaping the horrid little bunch of small minded scroll sniffers and going to go live with the natives.
A more blatant case of special pleading I have yet to see.
And reading the linked article, one might arrive at the interesting notion that Moor has added gynecologist to Jefferson’s myriad accomplishments.
Probably dollar tree
You know, really, that IS probably what they meant. When folks said “We’re going to sail to Cote d’Ivoire and brutally enslave everyone and bring them religion!” they didn’t mean they were going to teach them about Brahma. “Religion,” to most archaic, barbarous whites of the period, meant “OUR religion.” In fact, some of the most vociferous opposition to the Bill of Rights came from people upset about the imprecise wording of the First Amendment–they were afraid that someday we might have a Catholic president.