I stated an alternate reason for your varied post appearances, and I accept your explanation, pissy as it may be. I asked you a question - a reasonable question in light of other posts here lately - and I supplied a potential explanation with it to show that I was not set on a particular answer.
So is this your web site? http://members.aol.com/EndTheWall/organic_law.htm . Your text appears there verbatim, so that must be you.
Your citation of Brewer's dictum is refuted here. http://ahpa.azpolitics.net/columns/sam1-23-00.htm
Justice Brewer's statements are no more precedent than Justice Blackmun's similarly-lengthy recitation of baseball legends in [ital] Flood v. Kuhn [unital], 407 U.S. 258 (1972), the baseball antitrust case. All subsequent courts (with one possible exception) have cited [ital] Holy Trinity [unital] for its actual holding, that courts must read statutes sensibly to avoid absurd results from a blindly literal interpretation...
Second, a more accurate reading of Justice Brewer's dictum is that we Americans are a "religious people." The opinion does not grant Christianity legal privilege or establish it to the exclusion of other religions or of non-belief. The opinion's historical discussion of religion makes the point that the immigration law should not be interpreted in a way that infringes on the free exercise of religion. Justice Brewer, in his later writings, made this point absolutely clear. He noted that the United States is "Christian" only in that many of its people so believe, but that the religion should not receive legal status nor should non-Christians be compelled in any way to support Christianity.
I believe that the Founding Fathers, all of whom were either believers or did not wish to appear otherwise, went out of their way to create a government with no official religion and with no ties to one. They wanted to create a secular nation where citizens had the freedom to worship as they pleased, if they pleased. They created a nation with slavery, with narrowly-limited right of franchise on economic, racial, and gender lines, and with a similar lack of protection to ethnic, gender, and economic minorities. And yet, using the principles they handed down to us, we have managed to create a society freer and more just than any Founding Father could have envisioned through the spectacles of 18th-century acculturation.
They managed to create a government that has since risen above their individual faults and prejudices. I have no desire to return to them. Rather, I want to continue such struggle with our own.
