Pacific Views

Keeping religion in government, where it belongs.

Those congressional Republicans are busy protecting the country from the current wave of rampant godlessness. Under the title 'Constitution Restoration Act', members of both the Senate and House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would keep the federal courts from making any rulings involving the "acknowledgment of God" by the federal, state, or local governments or by government officials. While backers claim that the bill is only an attempt to re-affirm that God has guided the US since its founding, we think it's just another attempt to punish the courts for making decisions that make the religious right unhappy.

The bill is an obvious reaction to events such as the recent sacking of Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore. Moore had placed a 2.5-ton granite monument featuring the ten commandments in the rotunda of the state judicial building, and then refused to remove the monument after being ordered to do so by a federal court.

In fact, Moore's connection to the bill is quite intimate. According to one one of the bill's sponsors in the Senate, Democrat Zell Miller, Moore volunteered to help draft the Constitution Restoration Act and, in fact, wrote much of the bill.

(If Zell Miller's endorsement of Dubya wasn't enough to make us question whether Miller is really a Democrat, his sponsorship of a bill so obviously pandering to the religious right certainly clinches the mattter.)

You can find the text of the Constitution Restoration Act here.

More: We wandered over to Zell Miller's Senate website and found a speech on the 'deficit of decency' in the US that he delivered earlier this week. His views on the constitutional separation of church and state are, to put it mildly, appalling:

I stand shoulder to shoulder not only with my Senate co-sponsors and Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama but, more importantly, with our Founding Fathers in the conception of religious liberty and the terribly wrong direction our modern judiciary has taken us in.

Everyone today seems to think that the U.S. Constitution expressly provides for separation of church and state. Ask any ten people if that’s not so. And I’ll bet you most of them will say ‘Well, sure.’ And some will point out, ‘it’s in the First Amendment.’

Wrong! Read it! It says, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ Where is the word ‘separate’? Where are the words ‘church’ or ‘state.’

They are not there. Never have been. Never intended to be. Read the Congressional Records during that four-month period in 1789 when the amendment was being framed in Congress. Clearly their intent was to prohibit a single denomination in exclusion of all others, whether it was Anglican or Catholic or some other.