According to the man who may be the next chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court ("Scalia says religion infuses U.S. government and history," AP via Newsday):
...a religion-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.
"I suggest that our jurisprudence should comport with our actions," Scalia told an audience attending an interfaith conference on religious freedom at Manhattan's Shearith Israel synagogue. ...
In the synagogue that is home to America's oldest Jewish congregation, he noted that in Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never publicly use the word "God."
But, the justice asked, "Did it turn out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America? I don't think so." ...
Scalia told them that while the church-and-state battle rages, the official examples of the presence of faith go back to America's Founding Fathers: the word "God" on U.S. currency; chaplains of various faiths in the military and the legislature; real estate tax-exemption for houses of worship; and the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. ...
An "originalist," Scalia believes in following the Constitution as written by the Founding Fathers, rather than interpreting it to reflect the changing times.
Ok, I'm not a lawyer--much less a Supreme Court justice--but even I know that the word "God" on our currency and the phrase "under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance don't go back to the founding fathers; in fact, the former, in the phrase "in God we trust" was added only in 1957 and the latter just three years later, both during the height of McCarthyism. Meanwhile, "originalist" Scalia seems to ignore the fact that the word "god" appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights.
And what's with the bizarre meaningless statement about the separation of church and state vis a vis the treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust? Is Scalia suggesting that Jews were in fact endangered in Europe specifically because of an apparent lack of faith in God by European leaders? Given his bizarre logic, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 should never have been possible, since we're a country that wears religion on our sleeves and therefore somehow should be "safer," right?
