Scalia suggests religion infuses US government and history

[D_Raay]

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wi...,1455814.story

NEW YORK -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Monday that a religion-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.

"I suggest that our jurisprudence should comport with our actions," Scalia told an audience attending an interfaith conference on religious freedom at Manhattan's Shearith Israel synagogue.

An outspoken conservative, Scalia joined a gathering that included the chief judge of New York state, Judith Kaye, a member of this Orthodox synagogue where the late Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo had worshipped.

The discussion in the century-old edifice was lively.

"I have spent many private hours with Justice Scalia _ in print," said Kaye, who has led New York's highest court for almost a dozen years since she was appointed by Gov. Mario Cuomo, a liberal Democrat.

Scalia, 68, addressed the topic of government and its relationship to religion.

In the synagogue that is home to America's oldest Jewish congregation, he noted that in Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never publicly use the word "God."

But, the justice asked, "Did it turn out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America? I don't think so."

So does drunkedness, infidelity, war, and death. Doesn't mean we should welcome them with open arms.

The Founding Fathers created a barrier between religion and civil power for a very good reason. They knew from history that the very first thing one religion will do when it gains civil power is to kill off the proponents of any other religion. England was almost torn apart by the various factions cutting each others throats over whose god had the bigger dick. The horrors of Salem, Massachussetts were not so far in the past that anyone felt comfortable assuming a "holy" inquisition could not happen in the new world. And it was well remembered that Pastor Cotten Mather, worried that the Quakers were NOT of a mind to slaughter the indians, secretly plotted to have William Penn and his followers captured and sold into slavery in Barbados in 1682.

The Founding Fathers of this nation knew that the only way to provide religious freedom to all was to grant civil power to none. No one religion was to be accorded respect over any other. That is what the First Amendment means when it says "no law respecting". It means flat out there is no official religion in the United States. We are a secular government.