“The religious group, which will run the ark’s operations, won a federal court ruling in January that clarified that it can make religious-based hires even as it seeks a Kentucky tourism tax incentive worth millions.”
“We are a religious group and we make no apology about that, and (federal law) allows us that,” Ham said Thursday. “We’re requiring them to be Christians, that’s the bottom line.”
Those of you who think for one second that “separation of church and state” is a part of U.S. law need a history lesson. Most people, including a lot of anti-religious historians, get this horribly wrong, possibly by intent, as the many letters our Founding Fathers wrote clarifying the matter are readily available in the Library of Congress, if not online. I know this for a fact, personal first-hand knowledge, for I spent an appreciable portion of the summer of 1982 holding them in my white-gloved hands as I read through hundreds of the more than 50,000 documents kept in what was then The American Heritage room of the Library of Congress.
With that in mind…
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
The first part prevents Congress from allowing the establishment of any official religion or church. It was craft specifically to avoid the problem of the period, whereby England had established the Church of England as the “official” religion while persecuting all others. Some folks in Congress wanted to establish Christianity as the official religion, but most of the authors of our Bill of Rights wisely knew that if they did that, the next step would be to define which denominations were “acceptable” as “Christian,” and the saga of religious persecution that drove millions out of Europe would infect the United States and fester our freedoms forever.
The second part is much clearer, and simply means that Congress can NOT interfere with the free practice of religions. Subsequent decisions by various federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have established this applies at all judicial and legislative levels throughout our country.
BOTTOM LINE: Those who attempt to use Thomas Jefferson’s “separation of church and state” clause found ONLY in his letter to the Danbury Baptists are committing the SAME religious intolerance and persecution our Founding Fathers escaped from Europe and were trying to prevent here in the United States.
If you believe otherwise, you’re a Constitutionally illiterate idiot and are in serious need of an objective Civics class taught by someone who is not an anti-Constitutional atheist.