Happy Constitution Day

September 17, 2007

I suspect Hallmark doesn’t offer a card for the occasion — at least, not yet — but thanks for the efforts of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), today is Constitution Day in the United States. Even the president, whose appreciation for the document is suspect, issued a presidential proclamation to honor the day.

In light of the occasion, it’s probably a good time to take a look at the results of the 10th annual First Amendment Center’s national survey on the “State of the First Amendment.” This may not surprise you, but it appears Americans don’t know a whole lot about their constitutional rights.

Sixty-five percent of Americans believe that the nation’s founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation and 55% believe that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the “State of the First Amendment 2007” national survey released today by the First Amendment Center. […]

Just 56% believe that the freedom to worship as one chooses extends to all religious groups, regardless of how extreme — down 16 points from 72% in 2000. […]

25% said “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” well below the 49% recorded in the 2002 survey that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, but up from 18% in 2006.

One in four Americans believe the First Amendment “goes too far”? Really? Ouch.

Looking though the detailed survey tables (.pdf), a few other noteworthy results jumped out at me.

* Most Americans don’t know what’s in the First Amendment. There are five freedoms — freedom of speech was the only one named by a majority of respondents (64%), followed by religion (19%), press and assembly (each 16%), and petition (3%).

* Asked if newspapers “should be allowed to freely criticize the U.S military about its strategy and performance,” a combined 37% of Americans said they shouldn’t.

* Asked if musicians “should be allowed to sing songs with lyrics that others might find offensive,” a combined 42% of Americans said they shouldn’t.

* Asked if people “should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to religious groups,” a combined 39% of Americans said they shouldn’t.

* Asked if people “should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to racial groups,” a combined 56% of Americans said they shouldn’t.

* A jaw-dropping 55% of Americans agreed with the statement that the U.S. Constitution “establishes a Christian nation.” (For the record, the Constitution doesn’t mention God, Christianity, or the Bible at all. It’s an entirely secular document.)

* In one of the rare pieces of good news in the survey, a majority of Americans opposed a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, 59% to 38%. As recently as 2000, the public leaned in the other direction, 51% to 48%.

Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, said the “scariest” numbers dealt with freedoms for religious minorities. Only 56% agree that freedom of religion applies to all groups “regardless of how extreme their beliefs are” — down from 72% in 2000. More than one in four say constitutional protection of religion does not apply to “extreme” groups.

Happy Constitution Day. We have a lot of work to do .

Why do Americans hate our freedom?

  • And I used to wonder how that person got elected President in 2004. I wondered who the hell in their right mind would actually vote for him….

    We do get the government we deserve….

  • Happy Constitution Day

    As someone for whom the Constitution is the foundation of his political philosophy, and as a card carrying member of the ACLU, I say- Right back ‘atcha Steve!

    Thanks for using your freedom of speech. I love your blog.

  • This is very depressing. How can we fight for our rights if we don’t believe that we should have those rights?

    But I’m not surprised by the “Christian Nation” opinions. The propaganda on this subject has been waist-deep for at least the past 25 years. It just goes to show that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth for a lot of people.

  • “Extremism, in defense of liberty, is no vice”, heh?

    I can well imagine “religious” extremes, which would step well outside the bounds of first amendment protections.

    And, just because I don’t think the government should be penalizing personal expression, doesn’t mean that I think people should be, oh say, proclaiming white supremacy, or picketing funerals as political theatre.

  • “Only 56% agree that freedom of religion applies to all groups “regardless of how extreme their beliefs are”

    That’s probably because that is a confusing, and arguably inaccurate, statement. The First Amendment would not condone the practice of human sacrifice in the name of religious freedom, to give an “extreme” example. While it might protect a group that believed, but did not practice, human sacrifice, I suspect that most survey respondents were not drawing such fine lines between belief and practice. It’s not surprising, given the poor wording of that question, that it confused people.

    On another note, it might be more precise to say that there are six freedoms protected by the First Amendment, since the right to free exercise of religion and the right to be free from a government establishment of religion, while related, are conceptually distinct and sometimes in tension with each other.

  • I wish the Democrats would honor the constitution today by actually defending it.

    Put impeachment back on the table, Nancy. If the president violates the constitution, you should at least try to get rid of him and everyone who helped him do it.

  • The next time anyone says something about the US being a “Christian nation”, ask them which one: Is it a Catholic nation? Is it a Mormon nation? Is it a Baptist nation? Is it an Evangelical nation? etc… If they pick one, they’ve dissed all the others by saying they don’t count and if they say it is all of them, they’ve dissed all of them by saying the differences don’t matter.

  • “regardless of how extreme their beliefs are”

    This is the result of a shoddy question. Should the First Amendment protect a religion that advocates sacrificing virgins, cruelty to animals, or enslavement? It shouldn’t and it doesn’t. How about peyote use?

    It is unclear what the question is trying to probe, but there absolutely are limits to the freedoms guaranteed. Restrictions on defamation and false advertising are examples of legal limits on speech, and such limits are also placed on religious practices.

  • This is the result of a shoddy question.

    Yeah, I mean what if I say my religion requires as worship the intentional breaking of all the laws of the location I reside in. Does the Constitution protect me from having those laws enforced against me?

    Poll questions like that force lay-people to make distinctions that the experts the question’s subject matter don’t even adhere to. The question has to be a little longer and more detailed to be useful

  • All the misguiding information being preached to crowds every other Sunday about this “Christian” Nation has no public rebuttal that is repetitive and reaches as many people. These ‘Christian’ leaders have been spouting this lie from the pulpit and have even gone so far as to try to rewrite history in support of this lie. I wish the poll would have asked if these people knew that God, or the Bible or Christian was not mentioned in the 1st Amendment of the constitution. Thanks to the Christian Leaders many people believe these words were mentioned and were intended to produce a Christian nation.

  • This ‘freedom of speech’ one is a nutty old business. It seems very laudable, honorable and desirable till, as Bruce #6 says, you get someone proclaiming white supremacy, for example, or worse. It’s interesting, also, that freedom of the press and freedom to petition are referred to specifically though they would appear to be merely special cases of freedom of speech. It’s a very precious and delicious protection, this freedom of speech, but it is simultaneously both extremely vulnerable to governmental and institutional encroachment and load-mouthed abuse. Where to get a handle on it?

    Can speech harm? Yes, it can. Can speech heal? Yes, it can.

    Here’s a way to look at it. Our existence can be viewed in terms of body, speech and mind. It has a correspondence in the formula E = mc², where the body is m (mass), speech is E (energy) and c (speed of light) is mind. We can think, imagine and remember anything in an instant — at lightening speed. There is no protection for freedom of thought in any constitution that I am aware of. Thought is presumably considered beyond the reach of regulation by law or any other form of limitation.

    At the other end of the scale we have the body, the material component of our existence, against which there are mountains of rules and regulations, simply because it can be controlled from without, and also because it can appear to do the most damage.

    In between, in the middle, we have speech. Speech is interesting because it unites the body and the mind. To have something to say you have to have a thought, an idea, a vision or whatever, i.e. something which happens in the mind. In order to say it, you have to have a body — mouth, tongue, lips, larynx, lungs, etc., or hands, keyboard, pens, whatever. So speech requires both the mind and the body. It’s the half-way house. The mental component of speech cannot be controlled externally, while the physical component can.

    The whole of human evolution, culture, society, technology, religion and art has its origin in speech — the unique availability of common codes of abstract representation in the form of linguistic symbols, either written or spoken. This is why speech is, or should be regarded as, sacred. Without it we’d be nothing.

    Reaching into a more esoteric perspective, we can ask how powerful is the mind, the body, and speech, relatively, in their effect on others. The institutions of government, law and constitution exist entirely and solely to regulate and coordinate the effects that citizens’ actions, individually and collectively, have on each other. So it is a fair question to ask how relatively effective are the three components of body, speech and mind on fellow beings.

    At first it would seem that body is the most powerful. That’s true if you get hit by a car or stabbed in the back, or even just hit your thumb with a hammer. But in terms of the range and influence of the body it is actually very small. First of all, it has huge inertia: it can only move quite slowly. Secondly, its range is very limited: a few feet at most. Third, it can only directly affect a very small number of people at the same time — how many tables can a waiter serve simultaneously?

    Speech, on the other hand, can reach a whole crowd of people simultaneously. It travels, unaided, over a much greater distance at much greater speed than the body possibly can. By these measures it is much more powerful than the body. Assisted by technology, it can reach millions of people simultaneously instantly. On this basis you would expect speech to be much more strictly controlled than physical activity. It isn’t.

    Finally, mind. This is difficult to talk about without being laughed at, because it depends on a certain effort to enter and comprehend its potential — an effort which not everyone is prepared to make, either through fear or lack of conviction of its value. The mind, as you might gather from the logic of this thesis, is the most powerful of all. It has a power to bring benefit far beyond anything either speech or the body alone can achieve. The body is very limited. Speech has huge pervasive potential. The mind is limitless.

    — A little offering in honor of Constitution Day in the United States. OM AH HOUNG

  • Just got back from National Archives. All I can say is that I am fairly thankful for the Anti-Federalists who pushed ot have the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution. I shudder to think what would have happened or what actions the Sadministration would have taken these past 6 years without any express written enumeration of such rights.

  • ** Law is not heaven sent to a “xian nation” **

    The Constitution is the foundation document for the U.S. — there’s no natural law. Neither God nor religion plays any role. There are no “law givers.” Law does not get made on Sinai.

    The Constitution contains no reference to a god. The word ‘God’ does not appear. (‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’, ‘Christianity’ don’t appear either.) The word ‘religion’ appears only once, in Amendment One.

    It protects “freedom of conscience.” Initially the rights of a well-to-do white man (not slave, not female, not propertyless) to freely choose how to conduct his life as a legal person.

    One Civil War (1865), the vote for women (1920), one Civil Rights Movement (1965) — that’s the turbulent blood-soaked price paid so far for extending equality (reciprocity).

    Amendment One also establishes freedom *from* religion. The U.S is a secular state from its inception. The U.S. is *not* one nation under some god.

    It (she or he or some committee) doesn’t rule here. The people do. Not child molesting priests, not fanatical tax-dodging televangelists, nor cabals of delusional fundies seeking to overthrow the Republic.

    God-talk disappears from justificatory language of 1776 (in the Declaration of Independence) and gives way to a view of 1786 (in the Constitution) that the people give themselves their own dignity and rights as citizens.

    They enjoy or abuse their ‘freedom of conscience’ in matters of religion, speech, publications, public assembly, petitions to the elected representatives of the people, civil disobedience, and even armed revolution. Is this order on the edge of chaos? Yes.

    Some conjectured divinity (or divinized leader) no longer needs to exist as a “holy lie” a la Plato for people to act in ways consonant with social order. The people are sovereign; we abide by the laws which we create for ourselves.

    Let’s be clear here: The people are sovereign.

    Christ is not sovereign . . . God is not . . . they do not exist. They are as fictional as Zeus, Sherlock Holmes, or Batman. Theology is fan fiction.

    There are many who pretend to speak for their metaphysical nonentities, demanding social control and political domination. They are christo-fascists, threats to our secular Republic greater than all islamo-fascists combined.

    bipolar2
    copyright asserted 2007

  • In regard to the “religious extremism” answer, perhaps we have a new view of what extremism really means.
    The people who bomb abortion clinics, are they religious extremists?
    The people who flew the planes into the Twin Towers, or commit suicide bombings, are they religious extremists?
    Surely the First Ammendment does not protect these outward practices of “faith.”
    Where are the boundaries drawn? Harassing young women on their way to a Woman’s Clinic where abortions are performed? Driving people of a less faith-centered lifestyle out of town? Where does a group’s rights begin and an individual’s (or smaller group’s) end?

    The old saying that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose isn’t always honored, is it?

    I’m just drawing some normative boundaries here, and I can understand the answers in this light.

  • Sixty-five percent of Americans believe that the nation’s founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation

    It’s that fucking pledge.

    People have been brainwashed to say “Under God” since they first stepped foot into a school. Of course it’s a Christian nation! It says so right there: “one nation under god”.

    Come on folks, it’s not hard. All it takes to figure this out is a basic understanding of advertising and propaganda. If you repeat lies over and over again, they will believe them. If you force them to repeat lies over and over again, using their own mouths, starting with early childhood, they definitely will believe them.

  • Launching impeachment proceedings would have been a great way to celebrate Constitution Day. /wishful thinking

  • Asked if newspapers “should be allowed to freely criticize the U.S military about its strategy and performance,” a combined 37% of Americans said they shouldn’t.

    Funny–last I checked, Bush’s approval rating was also in the mid-thirties. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.

  • “Should the First Amendment protect a religion that advocates sacrificing virgins, cruelty to animals, or enslavement? It shouldn’t and it doesn’t.”

    It absolutely does. See: the Old Testament. (I may have to take back the “advocates sacrificing virgins” part if it turns out Isaac had already experienced the delights of the flesh at that tender young age. And yes, I am fully aware God stopped the sacrifice. But the point is, you are supposed to be ready to sacrifice even your own child to God.)

    The First Amendment also protects a religion that advocates murder (Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live).

    Good thing it does, eh, Christians?

  • I think there’s also a difference between what you *can* (legally) do and what you *should* do; I probably *could* say lots of nasty, bigoted, things about say, blacks, Jews, gays, etc and be legally protected (as soon as I got hold of someone in ACLU ). Doesn’t mean I *should* be saying those things. And, even some ot those things aren’t legally protected, IIRC; isn’t there something about “hate speech” in more modern law?

    Samten, @15,

    Whenever I hit my thumb with a hammer, my mind — with the speed of light — provides all the speech that my parents taught me was forbidden; a perfect union of the three.

  • The Constitution should be studied and memorized in every American history and social studies class. Questions about the Constitution and Bill of Rights should be on the SAT. No American should be able to graduate from high school without an understanding of its articles.

    And I agree with “Goatchowder” above – the Pledge of Allegiance should go the way of the dinosaurs. It’s probably the main reason why people think that America as a nation has something to do with “God”. If every schoolchild knew the Constitution by heart instead of the “pledge”, their would be a whole lot less of this “Christian nation” crap going around.

  • If you subtract 28% from these stats, we look okay.
    You know which 28% we’re talking about here.

    It’s clear we need to get some schoolin’ to the hard core red states.

  • Libra, you’ll appreciate this quote:

    “The right of free speech carries with it a responsibility to listen”.

    I’ve seen this one attributed to everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Bill Maher. Anyone know who really said it?

    My other favorite, this one IS from Franklin:

    “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

    55%+ think that this country was founded as a “Christian Nation”….OMFG. That’s it…I quit.

    What kills me is that if you ask most any of these flag-waving, over-the-top types, they couldn’t tell you what the other rights guaranteed by the original Bill of Rights are. Just ask someone what the eigth ammendment is and watch their facial expression.

    Norway is looking better everyday.

  • I don’t believe George Washington thought that we had established Christianity and the nation’s religion.

    From a letter penned by George Washington in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/hebrew/reply.html

    “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support”

  • “Christian” principles including holding slaves, marginalizing women, fear and loathing of sexuality, burning witches… did I leave any of the important ones out?

  • The Barbary Treaties: Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796

    Article 11:

    “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

    First, I think that a treaty established in 1796 is close enough to the founding of the nation for those involved to know what they are talking about. Second, as any legal scholar will tell you, once the US enters into a treaty, that treaty becomes not only an item of international law, but is specifically considered US Federal law. Thus it is established in law that the US is not and never has been a Christian nation.

  • The First Amendment promises the freedom to hold whatever religious beliefs one’s religion requires, but it does not promise the right to act on those beliefs when such actions would be contrary to public policies/laws.

  • It’s picky, bears no relevance to the rights we are assured, and only a crazy person would suggest the sentence establishes the U.S. as a Christian nation, but “Lord” is mentioned:

    “Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the states present the seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the independence of the United States of America the twelfth.

    In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names,

    G. Washington-Presidt. and deputy from Virginia…”

  • It’s that fucking pledge.

    People have been brainwashed to say “Under God” since they first stepped foot into a school. Of course it’s a Christian nation! It says so right there: “one nation under god”.

    I’d be just fine with the Pledge if we could go back to the way it was originally written! “Under God” was added in the ’50s to show those Godless Reds™ that God was on our side…

    And the funny thing is, the original Pledge, sans “Under God”, was written by a minister…

    —

  • Pingback: The Right’s Field » McCain: Constitution Established U.S. as Christian Nation; Suggests Religious Litmus Test

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