The Second American Civil War
Let me begin by quoting from the First Amendment to the US Constitution. In this crowd, I imagine half of you can recite it from memory, but here it is anyway… “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” That’s a little vauge. Does it mean separation of church and state? Thomas Jefferson thought so. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has another interpretation. In the court’s ruling on Cutter v. Wilkinson, decided May 31, 2005, he wrote:
The Establishment Clause provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Amdt. 1. As I have explained, an important function of the Clause was to “ma[ke] clear that Congress could not interfere with state establishments.” Elk Grove Unified School Dist. v. Newdow, 542 U. S. 1, 50 (2004) (opinion concurring in judgment). The Clause, then, “is best understood as a federalism provision” that “protects state establishments from federal interference.”
Huh? To simplify, he just said that states can establish official religions, and Congress is powerless to stop them! Where would he get such an idea? He may have gotten it from Justices Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist, both of whom share this view. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s three out of nine. At least we have protection from the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Does the establishment of a state religion violate the Fourteenth Amendment? Probably. So, some extremist Christians want to overturn it. Christian Exodus is a group undertaking a feat of social engineering that’s absolutely staggering. They are methodically moving evangelical Christians to certain cities and counties in South Carolina in order to allow them to ultimately TAKE OVER THE STATE! What then?
ChristianExodus.org holds that the 14th Amendment was enacted rather than being properly ratified. The history of this amendment is fraught with scandal and unscrupulous actions. The Amendment was properly voted on and properly rejected; only after the dissenting states were not allowed a vote was the Amendment passed.
This fraudulent act redefined the Federal government and its relationship to “The People”. We hold that it is the right of the various States to nullify this Amendment and all laws and court rulings arising from it.
With the Fourteenth Amendment neatly out of the way and (they hope) enough support on the US Supreme Court, South Carolina can establish a religion and Congress can only watch. But surely, those seem like modest goals. There must be more. THERE IS! They would also like to overturn the Sixteenth Amendment (which would eliminate federal taxes on the people of the state) and the Seventeenth Amendment (which would allow South Carolina to APPOINT Senators). While they’re at it, they also plan to strictly control immigration to the state, make homosexuality illegal and make abortion illegal in the state under their Tenth Amendment rights. And what if all of this doesn’t fly with the federal government? South Carolina could SECEDE!
My dear unbelievers, if you don’t yet see that we are at war with Christian Fundamentalism, a few minutes at ChristianExodus.org should open your eyes.
~I AM~
June 6th, 2005 at at 3:07 am
Good riddance to South Carolina. Let them leave the United States. Let all the religious fanatics move there. And all those who don’t hold those views start moving out. Let’s just see how long they can survive on their own before they go begging to be let back into to the fold of the federal government.
They think they can make it on their own … let them try. We are actually better off without those people around in my book.
June 6th, 2005 at at 8:16 am
I wrote about this last year, and had an experience in their Yahoo! Discussion Group. These folks are serious freaks.
http://www.brentrasmussen.com/archives/2004/05/the_christian_k.html
June 6th, 2005 at at 8:53 am
Let them go, and see if they will take Alabama and Roy Moore with them. As an added bonus that will be a few less red electoral college votes…
June 6th, 2005 at at 11:49 am
Hmm, that’s a very interesting article and I intend to check out that website when I get home. However, I must say that I disagree with the previous opinions of simply letting them have it and being glad that they are gone. Theocracies are dangerous enough when they are across the Atlantic ocean from us, how dangerous do you think they would be if they were simply next door? Religious fundamentalists need to be defeated wherever they may be on this planet if we are to have a truly prosperous and happy society. If it came to another Civil War so be it.
June 6th, 2005 at at 11:52 am
Oh, and I forgot to say. Angie said that they would be “begging to come back”. I definitely understand what she is saying in that the people would soon realize that a religious theocracy is NOT what they want. However, it would be too late, and the religious/political leaders would crack down on free speech and the like so that no one could voice their opinion. Just like another dictatorial or theocratic regime.
June 6th, 2005 at at 12:47 pm
I hope they succeed personally. Consider that South Carolina gets more federal money than it gives. Also consider its reliance on other states for trade and commerce. I imagine that cooperation between SoCar and the other 49 states would be inhibited by the secession. SoCar would be bankrupt in a short time.
Consider also what it would do to the demographic. All the decent people would high-tail it out of there, leaving the bigots, morons, and Christian militants all to themselves.
I actually wrote an email to the ringleader of that goon-squad about a year ago. I pretended to be Christian in my email but I phrased questions in such a way as to obviously be mocking or not agreeing with his little dream. He didnt like my email I must say LOL!
I wish the Christian Exodus group nothing but the acheivement of its secession goals and I hope they get themselves the Christian nation they always wanted. It will teach them (and the rest of the world) a hell of a lot about government, politics, religion, and society… and it will be very amisuing to see them crash and burn and come crawling back to the union, begging for mercy!
June 6th, 2005 at at 2:25 pm
In some sense I agree, it would be nice for a great example of how Christianity, when involved with government, results in disasterous consequences. The lesson would be learned, but by who? Of course the freethinking community would realize it, but we know that it would happen anyway. I doubt that the Christian community would be slowed down by it though. They would put the blame on a particular priest or group of leaders. “They weren’t REAL christians!” they would likely say. Hell, christians in the true United States might even want to be involved even more if they saw what SC was doing. They might want to show that SC is a bad example and that true Christians can run a government very well.
Yes, a failing christian theocracy would be a good example, but who is going to learn the lesson? And what kind of security risk would we face by a theocracy like that on our back porch? You know it probably wouldn’t just be SC, but perhaps other southern states as well.
June 6th, 2005 at at 9:05 pm
So, why do these problems seem to be predominately in the southern states? I read about the bible belt. This problem seems to have existed in one form or another in the south throughout our history. Slavery, KKK, NRA, Nascar (not a problem, I suppose- just a reflection of interests), christian sesession, etc., etc.. The one thing these topics have in common is religion. Religion helped allow slavery to persist. Bigotry (KKK) is still big in the south. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if the south would have sepereated from the Union. All the red states would be in one location!
June 6th, 2005 at at 11:07 pm
We have been at war with the Christians for a long time and the Mormons have already found out how difficult it is to be autonomous. The fundies have been vigorously trying to get their people elected at the local level for years. They start small, like local school boards, and then try to get ID inserted into the curriculum. They get onto city or county seats and try to get commandments posted in public places. Eventually they even get a friendly President and a few Supreme Court justices (Janice Brown is coming) appointed, however, as the Mormons have also discovered, the other religions will gang up with the secular side if any of their piece of pie is tinkered with too much. The other religions will always be our allies against these types of shenanigans.
June 7th, 2005 at at 12:38 pm
It never ceases to amaze me that some folks have no idea what “establishment of religion” means in the First Amendment. British history is the answer here. When Henry VIII broke away from Rome and the Church of England was born, it was an “established” church ie an official state church, with the King at its head as “Defender of the Faith”. Once you understand that context, the meaning of the First Amendment is crystal clear.
June 7th, 2005 at at 9:08 pm
Thank you Nigel.
June 7th, 2005 at at 9:20 pm
I often wonder how many of these people really believe in what they are saying/doing, independent of the political strategy it involves. Is this just another examples of clever politicians taking advantage of the feeble-minded Christian masses to get votes, or do they really believe this garbage? I’m sure there are true believers out there, but they have to be a small minority…don’t they? I’m not sure I can bring myself to get out of bed in the morning if I dwell on the idea of all these freaks running around out there.
June 8th, 2005 at at 12:20 pm
Following up on what Aaron said, it’s always amazed me that these people want to slash government spending, seeing how the “red” states are financially parasitic upon the “blue” states. It is also good to realize that all of these states are more or less purple, and that even though, say, Georgia, looks redder, one must remember that the exurban areas are parasites on, say, blue Atlanta. So what we would have if South Carolina succeeds is a group of exurban fanatics obsessed with not taxing themselves, and they would quickly find that their entire economic support structure which most of them had been unwittingly feeding on while living in isolation from reality would have vanished. Shadenfreude would be an unstoppable force in my life, at any rate.
June 21st, 2005 at at 1:36 am
(Um, no pun intended by the name–it’s more a gaming moniker)
Interestingly enough, South Carolina has tried this sort of thing not once but twice in the past–maybe that’s why they chose it–both the ‘nullification’ and separation parts. It didn’t fly with Andy Jackson, It didn’t fly with Abe Lincoln and those guys had a federal government the size of a gnat. It would indeed be funny to see, what with all the South carolina ‘wetbacks’ sneaking across the border into Georgia to pick fruit and clean houses–and get abortions, of course (no birth control, I bet). The birth rate climbs, the economy shrinks, inflation skyrockets and the next thing you know, they’re competing with the Dominican Republic for yankee vacation dollars to be spent in their casinos and brothels. And wait until the refugees from the first of many, many regime changes as the state religion splinters into fragments over each separate official interpretation of the Bible and the adherents accept the precedent of religious duty to control the state. In a decade, they’d be taking rickety boats to Haiti to work as domestics.
On the other hand, they could end up as a manufacturing center when wages fall below those of China and they sign up for NAFTA.
July 9th, 2005 at at 9:02 pm
[…] sh official religions. If you don’t understand the implications of that, go back to my June 6 post. Just days after the announcement, the time for media h […]