separation of church and state

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• 5-9-18
  

  “Maybe It’s Time That We Had a Chaplain that Wasn’t a Catholic”

  by David B. Parker

  There was a time when Southern Baptists thought we shouldn’t have a House of Representatives Chaplain at all.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  5-1-18
  

  How does Congress have chaplains without violating the separation of church and state?

  by Wendy Cadge and Laura R. Olson

  And why does the U.S. Congress employ chaplains?  And just what do they do?

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• 12-2-13
  

  Corporations Can Speak... But Can They Also Be Religious?

  by Emma Long

  The Supreme Court will consider religious exemption challenges to Obamacare in the upcoming term.

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• SOURCE: Jacksonville Journal Courier (IL)
  10-29-13
  

  Keep Religious Beliefs Out of State Laws

  by Steve Hochstadt

  Same-sex marriage opponents in Illinois are literally out of ideas.

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• 10-25-13
  

  Military Oaths Shouldn't End With "So Help Me God"

  by Chris Rodda

  The Founders never intended a religious test for military oaths, so what's behind the Air Force's convoluted swearing-in policy?

• SOURCE: WaPo
  8-7-13
  

  Charles C. Haynes: Dispelling the Myth of a ‘Christian Nation’

  Charles C. Haynes is senior scholar at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center and director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum in Washington.Culture warriors, pseudo historians and opportunistic politicians have spent the last several decades peddling the myth that America was founded as a “Christian nation.”The propaganda appears to be working. A majority of the American people (51 percent) believes that the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the State of the First Amendment survey released last month by the First Amendment Center.Because language about a Christian America has long been a staple of Religious Right rhetoric, it’s not surprising that acceptance of this patently false interpretation of the Constitution is strongest among evangelicals (71 percent) and conservatives (67 percent).But even many non-evangelical Christians (47 percent) and liberals (33 percent) appear to believe the fiction of a constitutionally mandated Christian America is historical fact.Forgive me for being snippy, but read the Constitution....

• SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
  8-6-13
  

  Student's simple stand made history in Abington v. Schempp

  He was a 16-year-old junior at Abington Senior High School, just making a statement, utterly unaware that he was about to make legal history.It was in 1956 that Ellery Schempp staged the classroom protest that yielded Abington v. Schempp, the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning mandatory Bible readings in public schools.When Schempp's homeroom teacher read aloud 10 verses from the New Testament at the start of the day, as required by Pennsylvania law, Schempp brazenly paged through a Quran he had borrowed from a friend.When a student read the Lord's Prayer over the public address system, another daily requirement, Schempp refused to stand.Those actions earned him trips to the principal and guidance counselor, and triggered years of litigation over his belief that such readings were unconstitutional....