State religion?
24 Responses to “State religion?”
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April 3rd, 2013 at 9:25 pm
Don’t the Southern States have official state religions? How is this any different than the Tennessee Constitution?
April 3rd, 2013 at 9:58 pm
Nobody shoots themselves in the foot quite like a Republican.
April 3rd, 2013 at 11:38 pm
I seem to remember a certain civil war settling this issue in North Carolina.
April 3rd, 2013 at 11:47 pm
What could go wrong??
Why, the state could pick the WRONG religion of course!
April 4th, 2013 at 3:17 am
The many of original thirteen states had an official state religion from quite some time. The Civil War didn’t decide anything on state religions.
TS
April 4th, 2013 at 7:32 am
Shootin buddy: that was the New England states.
April 4th, 2013 at 8:20 am
In the first 50 years of the republic, disestablishment of official state religions was the top ethical issue under consideration. Property rights of women was next on the list. When moderns marvel that “we” didn’t deal more effectively with slavery, they ignore the fact that “our” courts, legislatures and taverns were already occupied with these other huge issues that Yerp had ignored for centuries.
Their federal constitutional issue is valid, as far as it goes. The issue is Section 13 of their own state constitution: “no human authority shall, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience.” The “real” one (antebellum) covered this in Article 19.
April 4th, 2013 at 10:54 am
Tigerstripe:
Incorrect. The Civil War settled the issue of state governments ignoring the Constitution. The Constitution put Congress in charge of deciding statehood issues, and not individual states.
The 14th amendment was passed after the civil war to completely settle this issue. State were required to obey the Constitution and the Bill of Rights after that.
April 4th, 2013 at 10:58 am
comatus: They were getting around to it in 1840.
The Mason-Dixon compromise was all about kicking the slavery issue can down the road.
April 4th, 2013 at 2:10 pm
Kristophr: The First Amendment says
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Not “any government” or “the states”.
I’m sure the writers of the Constitution understood that Congress meant Congress unlike later judges would “find”, otherwise they would have written it to state that.
Also Northern states nullified the Fugitive Slave Act before and during the Civil War.
TS
April 4th, 2013 at 4:50 pm
Tigerstripe:
Carefully read the 14th Amendment.
It requires the states to conform to the entire bill of rights, something they did not have to do before the 14th Amendment was ratified.
As for the fugitive slave act, that was something passed by Congress, and not in the Constitution. Repealing was also something Congress could legally do.
It was what kicked off the Civil War, and the South was afraid ( correctly ), that the rest of the country would soon be able to end slavery.
April 4th, 2013 at 7:16 pm
“It requires the states to conform to the entire bill of rights, something they did not have to do before the 14th Amendment was ratified.”
This is a little inaccurate. The Bill of Rights was incorporated against the states piecemeal over the century or so after the civil war. The theory of incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states was born out of the 14th Amendment, but it was by no means an automatic thing. There was a great amount of debate over whether the 14th Amendment actually does what you say it does. Over time, that theory has come to dominate, but the suggestion that its passage somehow ended the debate is simply wrong.
April 4th, 2013 at 9:36 pm
“Shootin buddy: that was the New England states.”
No, it’s the Southern States. Surely Uncle is familiar with the state’s (his state) constitution.
Check out the Tennessee Constitution, Article IX, §2.
Much of the South has the same religion requirements–Maryland, Arkansas, Texas, etc.
April 4th, 2013 at 9:43 pm
That’s the establishment of religion. Not the establishment of a religion. But, yeah, I’ve mentioned it before.
April 5th, 2013 at 11:09 am
ern: I disagree.
The purpose of the 13th amendment was to free the slaves.
The purpose of the 14th amendment was to make the states respect the constitutional rights of all citizens, including those freed slaves.
The purpose of the 15th amendment was to give all citizens voting rights, including freed slaves, and end the practice of states deciding who may vote.
Arguments and debates against the 14th amendment being an enforcement of constitutional rights generally emanate from the anti-gun crowd these days, and other folks that want to abridge the bill of rights.
April 5th, 2013 at 11:18 am
Shootin Buddy: Not sure if TN and KY count as southern states.
NC is also kinda on the fence. In NC, the plebiscite to leave the Union lost. The state legislature decided to secede anyway.
April 5th, 2013 at 11:54 am
Kristopher: I have a masters degree in political philosophy. It’s history–it’s not up for debate. It’s part of the history of Constitutional law. How I described it is how it actually happened. Which is why we have decisions from the court like US v. Cruickshank that declared the first and second amendments didn’t apply to the states, even well after the 14th Amendment was ratified. The second amendment was only incorporated a few years ago.
Read this Wikipedia entry on incorporation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_Rights
It does a decent job of covering the history. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the 19th century (a generation after the Civil War) that the Supreme Court began considering the Bill of Rights as applying equally to the states. You are simply wrong on the history.
April 5th, 2013 at 4:18 pm
>Not sure if TN and KY count as southern states.
TN by most metrics, arguably not for KY, (and Maryland is probably the reason why they invented the phrase “the deep south” 😉
April 5th, 2013 at 4:37 pm
Ern:
I think you are arguing practice rather than what the law said. I’m pretty sure the intent was originally there. Once reconstruction was junked, states got away with ignoring it, abetted by the SCOTUS.
The bill of rights wasn’t seriously applied to states until the 1970’s as far as I can tell. Befere that point, if you pissed off a cop or the local government, you were going to get a tune up.
April 5th, 2013 at 4:43 pm
Standard Mischief: Look up the Baltimore Riots.
The majority didn’t want to secede, the state was already full of Unionist militiamen who had ridden the trains into the state in civilian clothes, and the governor threw in the towel and refused the legislature’s request to do so.
Maryland, BTW, was the last legal slave state, since the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to states not in rebellion.
April 6th, 2013 at 8:52 am
Kristophr: If the intent were there, we’d see it reflected in law and in the debate over the 14th Amendment. But we don’t–not in debate until the late 1890s, and not seriously in law until the 30s and 40s under a very different political regime.
The very earliest interpretations of the amendment specifically stated that the first eight of the constitutional amendments were specifically aimed at the Federal Government only, and didn’t fall under the 14th Amendment. In other words, it was assumed by nearly everyone at the time (as of, say the 1870s) that because those Amendments used the “Congress shall make no laws” language, that language exempted them from application to the states despite the language of teh 14th Amendment. At that point, the near unanimous opinion was that the Amendment applied only to the privileges and immunities clause. Hence the Slaughter House Cases (1873) and the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and so on and so on.
Again, this is not really disputed history. All but the second amendment were incorporated well before the 1970s, most in the 30s and 40s.
April 6th, 2013 at 11:16 am
Note that this was despite the language in the 14th Amendment, ern.
The impression I got was that once Reconstruction was aborted, all interest was lost in enforcing the actual language in the 14th amendment.
The courts simply swept the inconvenient parts of the amendment under the rug, in my opinion.
April 6th, 2013 at 3:57 pm
“Note that this was despite the language in the 14th Amendment, ern.”
Not in the way you seem to mean. The language of the Amendment is not exclusive. The intent and original reading was for the amendment to apply to the privileges and immunities clause (go back and read the decisions and discussion, if you like). In that era, the tendency was toward restrictive reading. That changed with later courts, who took a more expansive reading of the amendment. The language did not change. The Constitutional theory behind reading the Constitution changed–not the language.
“The impression I got was that once Reconstruction was aborted, all interest was lost in enforcing the actual language in the 14th amendment.”
Again, your “actual language” is influenced by a modern reading, not the reading of the amendment at the time. They read the amendment differently from the beginning. And that same reading persisted until the 1920s, and wasn’t fully changed until the 20s and 30s. There was no change of approach to the 14th amendment from the time of its passage until long after Reconstruction ended.
From their perspective, they *were* enforcing the actual language of the 14th Amendment. No one swept anything under the rug. It took a generation and a change of approach to reading the Constitution to get the 14th Amendment to say what you think it says today.
April 6th, 2013 at 4:42 pm
Ern,
Interesting information. Do you have any good references to read up on the subject?