More Bad News For Souter

George Neumayr takes no prisoners:

Perhaps nothing illustrates this era of judicial lawlessness better than the Supreme Court's ruling yesterday that the Ten Commandments, unless they are somehow aesthetically muted and secularized, be chiseled off courthouses across the country. Lawless judges cannot abide the sight of fixed laws adorning courts.

Imagine if the representatives of the states at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had a chance to review David Souter's secularized understanding of the First Amendment before deciding whether or not to ratify the Constitution. Would any of the states have ratified it? Would they have agreed to a constitution that gave federal judges the power to confiscate their public displays of the Ten Commandments?

No, not a single state would have ratified a constitution that gave the federal government the power to establish a de facto secular, lowest-common-denominator national religion that could swoop down and squash their local religious expressions. The whole purpose of the First Amendment was to create a wall not between the state and religion but between the federal government and state religious activity.

A historical fact almost no one ever mentions, which exposes Souter's understanding of the First Amendment as baldly unconstitutional, is that several states -- Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire -- still had their own religions after the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

And "in most of the other states," as author M. Stanton Evans wrote in the Washington Times in 1995, "there remained a network of religious requirements for public office -- typically, that one be a professing Christian of orthodox persuasion. Such requirements existed in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas. For example, the state of Vermont, one of the more liberal states of the era (admitted to the Union in 1791) required the following oath of office: 'I do believe in one God, the Creator and Governor of the Universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration and own and profess the Protestant religion.'"

So let's add this up: in the 18th century, the states enjoying the protections of the First Amendment could have their own state religions if they wanted, could institute religious tests for public office, and could pass laws against blasphemy and Sabbath-avoidance, among other offenses; in 2005, the states can't even put up the Ten Commandments in courthouses without aesthetic permission from the Supreme Court. (If states make sure to secularize their Moses and signal to viewers that they don't really believe in the Ten Commandments, then, maybe, you can hang them, the Supreme Court told the states.)

Perhaps the good judge took Womyn's Studies in college instead of American history?

Or instead of law, for that matter?