Arlen Specter Quotes
When Pat Robertson says there is no constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state, I say he is wrong.
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.
Carter was personally one of the most religious of our Presidents.
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}
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.
Arlen Specter was an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania from 1981 to 2011. Specter was a Democrat from 1951 to 1965, then a Republican from 1965 until 2009, when he switched back to the Democratic Party. First elected in 1980, he represented Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate for 30 years.
