[Kirobaito]

Originally Posted by 92bDad

In Everson v. Board of Education , Justice Hugo Black opined that the First Amendment forbids any interaction between church and government. He said that Jefferson's "Wall(of separation)...must be kept high and impregnable." That was a reference to President Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Baptists in Danbury, Conneticut. The stae religion in Connecticut at the time was Congregationalism, and they had petitioned the president for aid in religious disestablishment, which Jefferson himself had advocated as governor of Virginia. The Danbury Baptists were disappointed when the president failed to intervene on the grounds that the federal government was strictly forbidden from interfering in state matters.

Although Jeferson used the phrase "a wall of separation between church and state" in the letter to the Danbury Baptists, you have to look at the letter in context. The full statment reads, "I contemplate with sovereign revernce that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishement of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof, thus building a wall of separation between church and State.'" The "State" to which he referred is clearly Congress, which he calls the "legislature." And, of course he's right. The First Amendment clearly prohibits Congress from getting involved in the establishment of a national religion, and the reason is obvious. Congress is prohibited from doing so because that right was reserved for the states and the states alone.

So you say the decision was wrong. Fine. But don't say that it's still not the decision. That's precisely what you did.