The Constitution therefore received only marginal approval in several states, and North Carolina even refused to ratify unless clear restraints were placed on the power of the federal government (Chapter 10 contains greater details on how the states voted). The Constitution was eventually ratified, but a clear message had been delivered. Consequently, when the new federal government assembled, President George Washington promptly urged Congress to consider how the Constitution might be amended in order to address the concerns raised in the state conventions.
Congress responded, and the result was twelve proposed amendments specifying exactly what the federal government, and only the federal government, could not do. Of those twelve, ten (now termed the Bill of Rights) were ratified by the states. At the top of the ratified list was the amendment completely removing the subject of religion and religious expression from the jurisdiction of the federal government, thereby leaving it as it had been: in the hands of the states and the people.
Therefore, the Court’s 1947 decision to federalize the First Amendment and apply it against the people and the states was a complete abrogation of that Amendment.
The means by which the Court federalized the Bill of Rights was by rewriting the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment one of the three racial civil rights amendments added to the Constitution at the end of the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in 1865) abolished slavery; the Fifteenth (1870) provided black Americans the right to vote; and the Fourteenth (1868) guaranteed state privileges and citizenship, regardless of race. Yet, in the Everson case, the Supreme Court took the Fourteenth Amendment securing racial civil rights to federalize the issue of religious expressions. Such a possibility was not only unimaginable at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted but it was even specifically rejected by Congress during that period, 118 as well as by Supreme Courts afterwards.
First make worship a priority. Worship corporately. - David Barton
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