For people who doubt your characterization of where the "center" is, consider this: 2/3 of Americans oppose the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. Is your idea of a "centrist" person someone who believes school prayer would be a good idea if the law were different?
There is no Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. There is a Supreme Court decision[1] that upheld the traditional separation of church and state and interpreted the First Amendment to mean that state-run schools cannot force children to participate in a prayer. In particular, state legislation mandating prayer violated the Establishment Clause.
The Constitution doesn't say anything about "separation of church and state." The Establishment Clause says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."
This is one of those funny areas where liberals get originalist and turn to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. The "separation of church and state" view derives from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802. Of course, TJ wasn't even in the United States at the time the Constitution was written, and he was a bit of a kook even in his day. The thing you have to remember is that "establishment" had a specific meaning back then--several states had "established" churches: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/801/established.... Given that, the most sensible reading is that the Establishment Clause prohibits Congress from regulating those established churches: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl....
The "separation of church and state" view is odd because several states had official established churches until long after the Constitution was adopted: "New Hampshire kept its establishment until 1817; Connecticut kept its establishment until 1818; and Massachusetts did not abandon its state support for Congregationalism until 1833."
You're incorrect to characterize Engel v. Vitale as saying schools "cannot force children to participate in a prayer." That would be a straightforward violation of the first amendment Free Exercise Clause. The New York law in that case was voluntary--it encouraged but did not require students to participate in prayer. The case banned prayer in schools with any sort of official sanction.
Engel is odd even leaving aside the original meaning of the Establishment Clause. Public support for religion is the norm, and sometimes even a constitutional right, throughout Europe. Several European countries, such as the Germany, Italy, and Spain, guarantee that parents can access religious education in public schools. The U.K. goes further and mandates daily school prayer "of a broadly Christian character." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_worship_in_schools. (Funnily enough, Spain has a constitutional provision that says "no religion shall have a state character." Nobody reads that to preclude teaching religion in public schools.)
> The "separation of church and state" view is odd because several states had official established churches until long after the Constitution was adopted: "New Hampshire kept its establishment until 1817; Connecticut kept its establishment until 1818; and Massachusetts did not abandon its state support for Congregationalism until 1833."
That's not odd. The bill of rights originally did not apply to state governments. It was only after the 14th amendment that the Supreme Court started incorporating the rights on state governments. Of course some states had similar language in their own constitutions before that.
Engel did absolutely strike down forcing children to pray in public schools.
> This is one of those funny areas where liberals
Can we please not do this "liberals" / "conservatives" read-team/blue-team stuff? Because then I'll just turn around and say "conservatives love to point out that phrase 'separation of church and state'" doesn't appear in the constitution and I'll just point you to Everson[1] that absolutely interpreted the First Amendment this way, and even quoted TJ himself.
The median voter also supports single payer healthcare and [insert lots of extreme opinions supported by the median voter here]. Centrist designates something approximating "elite public opinion," not any actual idealized voter who falls in the middle in all his attitudes.
And once you accept that centrist is simply the designator for elite public opinion, most corporate media is clearly centrist, because they're basically clearinghouses for elite public opinion.
>For people who doubt your characterization of where the "center" is, consider this: 2/3 of Americans oppose the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. Is your idea of a "centrist" person someone who believes school prayer would be a good idea if the law were different?
I provided the website from which I got those details. I don't know how they come to these conclusions but I would tend to find that they are correct.
Well, if you had checked your source before spreading it, you'd know they just make it up. It's completely subjective, it's just whatever the owners feel like.
For instance, here's something they don't do: take a random sample of a source's news articles, anonymize the source, ask random people to rate them, and collate the ratings into an overall rating. I'm not saying that'd be a good way to do it, but at least it'd be something.
