Hugo Black Quotes
The 1st Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.
Hugo Black, 1886-1971, U. S. Senator (Democrat, AL), U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Everson v. Board of Education, 1947
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is one of the key documents showing the “wall of separation of church and state” was in use in early America. Almost 200 years later the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court seemed ignorant of this communications. See William Rehnquist: {373663}
Carter was personally one of the most religious of our Presidents.
At the time. Catholics in America were proportionately many fewer than today, and anti-Catholic sentiment and discrimination was very common. If the government then could become involved with religion, the protestant-dominated government would likely have restricted the Church and Catholics. So Catholics were, like Bishop England an absolutist for the separation of church and state. However towards the end of the 20th century, Roman Catholics were about 25% of the population and anti-Catholic sentiment was reduced to relatively few Protest extremists, who were rejected by the main stream even of Protestants. Then the Catholic bishops began to change their position and advocated Federal aid to parochial schools and various Catholic social services. They also began to lobby government to make laws enforcing the Catholic views of morality.
While this principle is very clear to us today, and was to the people who originally ratified The Constitution, there were many attempts by Christian groups to establish a privileged position for Christianity. For example, for years the Sunday Sabbath was legally enforced by unconstitutional Blue Laws that prohibited businesses from operating on the Christian Sabbath and prohibited activities that compete with Sunday church attendance. Supreme Court Justice Story even argued that the First Amendment allowed Christian religious supremacy and Cooley wrote this to refute Story’s now discredited doctrine.
This is a critical quotation on the government establishment of religion issue. There are a few people who have argued over the years that the Founding Fathers and their culture was religious and where they were careful to avoid favoring one religion over another, they did NOT intend to put atheism on the same equal plane as religion as far as government action is concerned. However, some of the Founding Fathers were atheists, and some others like John Adams were deists—they believed in a God but not in the Trinity or in Judaism or any organized religion. So this quotation makes it clear that the First Amendment does NOT favor religion over non religion or secularism. Atheism must be on an equal footing but not on a higher plane.
Madison, while a member of the House, had opposed the appropriation of funds for Congressional Chaplains and lost. Strict constructionists often quote his statements regarding Congressional Chaplains. Loose constructionists point to the fact that a majority of the Congress indeed appropriated the funds.
Hugo Lafayette Black was an American lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as a U.S. Senator from 1927 to 1937 and as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971. A member of the Democratic Party and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections. Having gained a reputation in the Senate as a reformer, Black was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 63 to 16 (six Democratic Senators and 10 Republican Senators voted against him). He was the first of nine Roosevelt appointees to the Court, and he outlasted all except for William O. Douglas.
