DownWithTyranny!: Republican Party Spokesmodel Claims The First Amendment Protects Christians Only

I finally stopped following the demented Twitter ravings of GOP Hate Talk Radio host Bryan Fischer and… my life is more relaxed and productive without all that satanic hatred and bigotry spewing out of him. One thing about Fischer, though… whatever extremist, anti-social nonsense he's spouting now, will become official Republican Party doctrine in a relatively short time. Today's trash-talk is tomorrow's party platform-- first in Texas and then in even normal states' Republican Parties. Friday he was reminding he followers that the far right position is that the First Amendment was written only for Christians. This Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Three of the biggest states of the original 13-- New York, Virginia and Massachusetts-- refused to ratify the Constitution without an enforceable Bill of Rights. James Madison wrote 20, which eventually became the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.In 1947, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black write for the majority that "The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion to another ... in the words of Jefferson, the [First Amendment] clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and State' ... That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach."

More recently (1994), Justice David Souter, writing for the majority, asserted that "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion." The idea that the First Amendment was somehow meant to apply only to Christians is bizarre and unsupported by history or common sense-- and just garbage floating around on the outer fringes of the far right-- so you can count on it being part of the GOP mainstream in about a year. "I have contended for years," raves Fischer, "that the First Amendment, as given by the Founders, provides religious liberty protections for Christianity only. Most attorney types, befuddled by years of untethered Supreme Court activism, think it covers any and all religions you can name." He contends that the word "religion" was meant by the Founders as being a synonym for "Christianity." He is, as usual, dead wrong. During the Revolution, there were even member of Congress who wanted to ban the use of English and adopt Hebrew as the American language! By 1776 there were 2,000 Jews in the colonies and while a third of the Christians, basically, the conservatives, fought for the British side, virtually 100% of the Jews fought with the rebels and were key in helping to finance the Revolution as well. President George Washington remembered the Jewish contribution when the first synagogue opened in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790: "May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in the land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants. While everyone shall sit safely under his own vine and fig-tree and there shall be none to make him afraid."

And in terms of the far right's bête noire, Muslims, the Founding Fathers certainly included them as well.

At a time when most Americans were uninformed, misinformed, or simply afraid of Islam, Thomas Jefferson imagined Muslims as future citizens of his new nation. His engagement with the faith began with the purchase of a Qur’an eleven years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s Qur’an survives still in the Library of Congress, serving as a symbol of his and early America’s complex relationship with Islam and its adherents. That relationship remains of signal importance to this day.

That he owned a Qur’an reveals Jefferson’s interest in the Islamic religion, but it does not explain his support for the rights of Muslims. Jefferson first read about Muslim “civil rights” in the work of one of his intellectual heroes: the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. Locke had advocated the toleration of Muslims-- and Jews-- following in the footsteps of a few others in Europe who had considered the matter for more than a century before him. Jefferson’s ideas about Muslim rights must be understood within this older context, a complex set of transatlantic ideas that would continue to evolve most markedly from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Amid the interdenominational Christian violence in Europe, some Christians, beginning in the sixteenth century, chose Muslims as the test case for the demarcation of the theoretical boundaries of their toleration for all believers. Because of these European precedents, Muslims also became a part of American debates about religion and the limits of citizenship. As they set about creating a new government in the United States, the American Founders, Protestants all, frequently referred to the adherents of Islam as they contemplated the proper scope of religious freedom and individual rights among the nation’s present and potential inhabitants. The founding generation debated whether the United States should be exclusively Protestant or a religiously plural polity. And if the latter, whether political equality-- the full rights of citizenship, including access to the highest office-- should extend to non-Protestants. The mention, then, of Muslims as potential citizens of the United States forced the Protestant majority to imagine the parameters of their new society beyond toleration. It obliged them to interrogate the nature of religious freedom: the issue of a “religious test” in the Constitution, like the ones that would exist at the state level into the nineteenth century; the question of “an establishment of religion,” potentially of Protestant Christianity; and the meaning and extent of a separation of religion from government.

…In 1783, the year of the nation’s official independence from Great Britain, George Washington wrote to recent Irish Catholic immigrants in New York City. The American Catholic minority of roughly twenty-five thousand then had few legal protections in any state and, because of their faith, no right to hold political office in New York. Washington insisted that “the bosom of America” was “open to receive . . . the oppressed and the persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.” He would also write similar missives to Jewish communities, whose total population numbered only about two thousand at this time.

One year later, in 1784, Washington theoretically enfolded Muslims into his private world at Mount Vernon. In a letter to a friend seeking a carpenter and bricklayer to help at his Virginia home, he explained that the workers’ beliefs—or lack thereof-- mattered not at all: “If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans [Muslims], Jews or Christian of an[y] Sect, or they may be Atheists.” Clearly, Muslims were part of Washington’s understanding of religious pluralism-- at least in theory. But he would not have actually expected any Muslim applicants.