[Illustration by ALEX FINE]
ASSOCIATED PRESS: “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” O’Donnell asked him. When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell asked: “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?” Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience. “You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp,” Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O’Donnell’s grasp of the Constitution. Erin Daly, a Widener professor who specializes in constitutional law, said that while there are questions about what counts as government promotion of religion, there is little debate over whether the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from making laws establishing religion. “She seemed genuinely surprised that the principle of separation of church and state derives from the First Amendment, and I think to many of us in the law school that was a surprise,” Daly said. “It’s one thing to not know the 17th Amendment or some of the others, but most Americans do know the basics of the First Amendment.” MORE
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NEWSWEEK: For leaders like Lincoln and Jordan, the Constitution is a symbol “that suppl[ies] an overarching sense of unity even in a society otherwise riddled with conflict,” as sociologist Robin Williams once wrote. It is an integrative force—the cornerstone of our civil religion. The Tea Partiers belong to a different tradition—a tradition of divisive fundamentalism. Like other fundamentalists, they seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture and the imagined past it supposedly represents. Like other fundamentalists, they see in their good book only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don’t sweat the details, and they ignore all ambiguities. And like other fundamentalists, they make enemies or evildoers of those who disagree with their doctrine. In the 1930s, the American Liberty League opposed FDR’s New Deal by flogging its version of the Constitution with what historian Frederick Rudolph once described as “a worshipful intensity.” In the 1960s, the John Birch Society imagined a vast communist conspiracy in similar terms. In 1992 conservative activists formed what came to be known as the Constitution Party—
Sharron Angle was once a member—in order to “restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.” Today, Angle asserts that “separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine,” and Palin claims that “the Constitution…essentially acknowledg[es] that our unalienable rights…come from God.” The point is always the same: to suggest that the Constitution, like the Bible, decrees what’s right and wrong (rather than what’s legal and illegal), and to insist that only the fundamentalists and their ilk can access its truths. We are moral, you are not; we represent America, you do not. Theirs is the rallying cry of culture war. MORE
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SALON: If it’s not completely intolerable to have active-duty soldiers handcuffing American journalists on U.S. soil while acting as private “guards” for Senate candidates, what would be? This is the sort of thing that the U.S. State Department would readily condemn if it happened in Egypt or Iran or Venezuela or Cuba: active-duty soliders detaining journalists while they’re paid by politican candidates? The fact that Joe Miller has been defending the conduct of his private guards in handcuffing a journalist and threatening others with handcuffs should be disqualifying by itself. That reveals a deeply disturbed authoritarian mind. But the fact that these guards are active-duty U.S. soldiers makes this entire incident far more disturbing. Shouldn’t American journalists of every stripe be vehemently protesting this incident? MORE