Cultural War in Jesusland

While the rest of the country is still obsessed with the cultural war against all things Southern, particularly against the dreaded totem of the former Confederate battle flag as the symbol of universal hate and iniquity, in the boastful (and ironically ahistorical) “Reddest of the Red States,” Okies are fighting the war on a different front. The Oklahoma State Supreme Court has recently ordered the removal of a monument commemorating the Ten Commandments, citing a provision in the state’s Constitution. In defiance of the Court’s ruling, the Sooner States’ governor has proclaimed that the monument will continue to stand on the Capitol grounds.

This is the same blonde harridan, Mary Fallin, who was roundly booed by hundreds of delegates during her address to the 2012 Oklahoma GOP State Convention when she called on the assembled to unite behind Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. In a haughty and stentorian tone, Fallin said Romney was the party’s decided choice (as if votes in the remaining contested state primaries and caucuses throughout the nation were already negated) and Ron Paul’s substantial grass-roots candidacy and wide support among the Sooner State party faithful did not exist. At this disdainful treatment the crowd erupted in volcanic shouts of “Ron Paul, Ron Paul,” and the governor shouted back “What are ya, a bunch of Obama lovers” and quickly exited the stage. As for the rest of the convention’s duplicitous proceedings, they would have made Mayor Boss Daley and his Chicago ward heelers proud.

From almost the creation of the American nation-state, we have had the hoary myth of religious pluralism, with separation of church and state under the guise of the First Amendment, used to justify bigotry, intolerance and discrimination.

There is an excellent detailed discussion of the Blaine Amendment (and the various state versions such as that passage the Oklahoma Supreme Court cited from the Oklahoma Constitution) in Philip Hamburger’s magisterial book, Separation of Church and State. James G. Blaine (best remembered in history as “the continental liar from Bangor, Maine”) was ambitious and was seeking the GOP presidential nomination. He proposed his Amendment (and deliberately let it languish in committee) because he had solid Roman Catholic familial ties which might become known. (His mother was an Irish Catholic and his parents had been married in a Catholic Church).

The proposed amendment codified the church-state separation Blaine was promoting, stating that:

No State shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.

The Amendment was to shore up the militant anti-Catholic element in his base. Remember these were the halcyon days of the prohibitionist, anti-Catholic, Yankee Protestant evangelical domination of the Republicans, waving the “bloody flag” of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” against their Democratic foes.

Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He is a scholar of constitutional law and its history, and his publications include Separation of Church and State (Harvard 2002), Law and Judicial Duty (Harvard 2008), Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (Chicago 2014), and numerous articles. Before coming to Columbia, he was the John P. Wilson Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He also has taught at George Washington University Law School, Northwestern Law School, University of Virginia Law School, and the University of Connecticut Law School.

Hamburger challenges and thoroughly documents his assertion that the First Amendment to the Constitution did not establish the modern conception of the separation of church and state. Most state governments at the time of the ratification had official state churches, supported by tax monies, particularly in the North. He shows that separation became a constitutional “freedom” issue largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants and anti-clerical free masons, ranging from 19th century Know Nothings and post-millennial evangelical pietists to 20th century members of the KKK, adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Roman Catholics in public life (particularly in education – culminating in the famous Supreme Court case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, where the Klan-dominated Oregon state legislature passed a law outlawing all parochial schools in competition with the government schools it controlled.)

That section the OK Supreme Court cited in the Oklahoma Constitution has nothing to do with establishing religious freedom, tolerance, or pluralism. It was put in there by the vicious racist and freemason William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray to satisfy and placate the anti-Catholic bigots which created the State of Oklahoma. Murray was President of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention and later governor. The first bill enacted by the state legislature provided for racial segregation throughout the state, another example of the “humanitarian pluralism” of the Progressive Era. Gradually, these Protestant zealots and masons were joined by anti-Christian secularists who hoped separation would limit Christianity and all other distinct religions from impacting American life. The darkly prophetic message of William H.  McIlhany’s excellent 1976 book, The ACLU On Trial, is being fulfilled.

US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who in 1947 established the modern judicial doctrine of the “high wall of separation between church and state” on allegedly “Jeffersonian” grounds, was in reality, a dedicated Klansman and free mason, who had had his own agenda of insidious anti-Catholicism at the root of his efforts. Again see the authoritative volume, Separation of Church and State, by the distinguished legal scholar Phillip Hamburger. In September of 1923 Hugo Black joined the powerful Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1 and promptly became Kladd of the Klavern – the officer who initiated new members by administrating the oath about “white supremacy” and “separation of church and state.”

The Alabama Democrat Black rose to be United States Senator with the full support and clandestine efforts of the Klan. Grand Dragon Jim Esdale, who served as Black’s unofficial campaign manager, later observed concerning Blacks’ able use of the Klan for organizing and campaigning for public office: “Hugo could make the best anti-Catholic speech you ever heard.” Black and Esdale covertly campaigned in nearly all 148 Klaverns in the state. Later the great civil libertarian and exponent of human rights Franklin Duplicitous Roosevelt appointed this specimen to the Court.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Black wrote decisions relating to the establishment clause, where he insisted on the strict separation of church and state. He delivered the opinion of the court in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), which held that the establishment clause was applicable not only to the federal government, but also to the states. Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices at the time of this decision were free masons. The most notable of these “separation of church and state” decisions was Engel v. Vitale (1962), which declared state-sanctioned prayer in public schools unconstitutional.

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11:27 pm on July 10, 2015