Kavanaugh Shows He's Eager to Tear Down Wall Between Church and State.... [View all]

[Honeycombe8]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/kavanaugh-separation-church-state-morris-county.html

Brett Kavanaugh Shows How Eager He Is to Tear Down the Wall Between Church and State

....Yet in 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court flipped the First Amendment on its head by ruling, for the first time ever, that the Constitution sometimes requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church. Its decision in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer blew a chunk out of the wall between church and state. And on Monday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh announced his intention to demolish the remainder of that wall by invalidating laws that bar government subsidization of religion.

On Monday, Kavanaugh vindicated Sotomayor’s fears by seizing upon a case called Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders v. Freedom From Religion Foundation. In Morris County, 12 churches sought to help restore their facilities with historic preservation funds provided by the county. But the New Jersey Constitution, like the Missouri Constitution, bars direct aid to religion, and a taxpayer, represented by FFRF, sued to enforce this provision. But the New Jersey Supreme Court....(found that) New Jersey taxpayers, the court held, cannot possibly be obligated to subsidize the literal exercise of religion.

Kavanaugh disagreed. Although the Supreme Court declined to hear Morris County, Kavanaugh wrote separately to condemn New Jersey’s “pure discrimination against religion.” In his view, “prohibiting historic preservation grants to religious organizations simply because the organizations are religious would raise serious questions under this Court’s precedents and the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee of equality.” Eventually, Kavanaugh wrote, the court should affirm the “bedrock principle of religious equality” by striking down laws that restrict states’ ability to preserve houses of worship with taxpayer dollars. Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch joined his opinion.

The article goes on to say,

Still, the wrecking ball looms. There is no obvious limit to the principle enshrined by Trinity Lutheran. The New Mexico Supreme Court has already used it to let the state fund textbooks for religious schools. It would seem to open school voucher programs to parochial institutions. And once Kavanaugh gets the right case, he will deploy Trinity Lutheran to open historic preservation funds to houses of worship. The Supreme Court is rewriting the First Amendment by creating a constitutional right to taxpayer-subsidized religion.

Kavanaugh, Alito, and Gorsuch. The three religious nuts on the S.Ct.