Establishment Clause

The First Amendment commands that the government, and that includes a county commission, shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

These are known as the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, and both require strict government neutrality between all religious denominations.

Yet

the county may have violated both the establishment and free exercise clause by effectively favoring one religion over another without a compelling justification that can survive strict judicial scrutiny.

Opponents of the Islamic Center point to the lack of consistency in weighing zoning and density and traffic issues, as well as the lack of actual notice of the zoning hearing, and therefore the absence of any meaningful community involvement.

Cavalry could also prevail in an as-applied challenge if the commission's decision-making in these two cases showed a departure from strict neutrality and instead a preference for an Islamic proposal over a substantially similar Christian proposal.

If so, cavalry and all non-Muslims in Palm Beach County may have claims under Section 1983 of the federal statutes against county officials who, acting under color of state law, violated the First Amendment's Free Exercise and Establishment Clause.

Such claims also allow for punitive damages and attorney's fees.

But recognizing the truth of history is not the same thing as a government endorsing a religion.

And the men who wrote the Establishment Clause understood that better than anyone else alive, but they weren't checking with their local wiener.

September 1789.

First Congress votes to hire and pay chaplains to open the House and the Senate with prayer.

And time and time again, MAGA shows us that they are out of step with American ideals.

And it's just a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Establishment Clause, the separation of church and state.

I mean, just blatantly like this.

This would be a textbook case that they would teach in law school as to when a government agency crosses the line.

But, you know, it's interesting.

In this denial, the Future Farmers of America cited that it is a federally chartered educational organization and must adhere to the Establishment Clause and prohibit religious activity.

Yeah, that's the crazy thing.

That

doesn't make sense.

No, it doesn't make sense.

Establishment clause? They're

saying that the establishment clause.

We're going to explicitly prevent the establishment of religion.

People will point out, oh, a lot of these states had established religion specifically at the founding of the Yeah, that's a lot of why we decided to have the Establishment Clause.

That's why when they were founding the documents, they were like, we don't really want to have this established religion.

They were very aware that many states had established religions and they were trying to

The report lays out a bunch of recommendations that are really concerning, and I think we should sort of dive into them here.

The very first recommendation from the report is that the Department of Justice has been instructed to issue guidance on the quote unquote proper understanding of the Establishment Clause.

and church-state separation.

So as you can imagine, coming from this biased commission and a Department of Justice that is also highly politicized and has a specific religious viewpoint, it's not going to mean good things for this American original idea of a separation of church and state.

What it also says about the establishment clause is pretty narrow.

Like it says basically, you know, government can't take over the functions of a church or coerce religious observance,

right?

Which is very narrow.