Skatje Myers, daughter of the (in)famous PZ Myers, and self-described “atheist, agnostic, rationalist, complicated vegetarian (sans dairy and eggs mostly, avec dumpster diving, by-products, and ethical sources), existential and moral nihilist, social democrat,” explains what is and isn’t meant by the disestablishment clause of the American Constitution.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
The religious clauses of the first amendment serve three purposes: The government may not set up a church (as England did), the government may not create laws that unfairly support one religion over another (for instance, taxing all religious institutional except the Christian ones, or Congress deciding to put crap about God on government currency), and the government may not prevent anyone from practising their religion.
Enacting legislature that lines up with the moral views of a religion (“Thou shall not murder”, anyone?) generally does not violate this. It does not favour that particular religious establishment, it does not say “you have to follow this religion” or “you can’t follow your religion”. On the other hand, we’d have some problems with “Thou shalt not have other gods before me”, but that’s not the sort of legislature we’re talking about here. A Christian who does not want gays to marry is not asking the government to force everyone to be Christian; they are asking the government to force gays to not to be allowed to marry. The Constitution allows for this.
I don’t know of very many who advocate for gay marriage on the basis of the establishment clause. It’s usually more a matter of the 10th amendment (against a federal ban) or the 14th amendment (equal protection).
I was taking it as a response to a response to arguments against gay marriage. Certainly many advocates for SSM see opposing as some kind of imposition of religion.
I think they could still say that banning SSM is being motivated in part by those wishing to impose their religious views, Myers is just saying that this is a constitutionally allowable way to impose one’s views. Arguably the 19th C. Quakers and other religious abolitionists were imposing their religious views on what was a legal industry, but they were likewise not breaking any kind of establishment clause.
I think that Skatje’s analysis is partly correct. To complete it you would just have to mention that the framers understanding of religion was not the same as ours. In general, religion was understood as varieties of Christian belief. Islam and atheism are not religions – and therefore not protected.
Well, Thomas Jefferson, among others, was pretty clearly a Deist. His re-writing of the gospels would get him branded as a heretic at a minimum by most American Christians today. Ben Franklin was likely an atheist if I recall correctly. So clearly not all of them were thinking about protecting orthodox Christianity.
Ben Franklin was also a Deist, not an atheist. Both him and Jefferson believed in the necessity of organized religion for the state. So while they may not have been orthodox in fact, they still counted themselves as part of the Christian faith in a general sense. Otherwise, why would Jefferson bother removing the miracles from the Bible? He clearly believed the Bible was valuable – just the miracles were not the valuable part.