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Church, state, and original intent

By Alliance Alert

Lee J. Strang, associate professor of law at the University of Toledo College of Law, writing at First Things / On The Square: In Church, State, and Original Intent, Donald Drakeman, a lecturer in Princeton University?s department of politics, shows that the strict-separationist interpretation was a house built on sand. ... The no-national-church interpretation of the Clause, Drakeman argues, is the broadest interpretation the evidence will support. Beyond that core of determinate original meaning, there is insufficient linguistic consensus. For instance, as he argues, the term 'establishment' included legally established preferences for one sect or denomination, but we do not know what it may have meant beyond that. Hence, the Clause does not answer many of the questions that exercise church-state debates today. These are (or ought to be, under the Constitution) the domain of constitutional construction by the political branches."

Full post as published by Constitutionally Correct on July 21, 2010 (boomark / email).