Brent,
Thank you for bringing clarity to the topic. Now I can use this weekend to digest your post (smile). 

Anita 



-- Brent Tarter <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I take my own advice and change the name of the subject.

My post the other day about how the words of the First Amendment dealing
with religious liberty might be read more than one way was simply to
point out that the language is not what most people think that it is, in
that it does not erect a wall of separation between church and state and
does not mention the states and does not on its face proclaim full
religious liberty. The language is a starting place in a very long and
complex legal history saga that is not yet over; and we might even argue
that the language is not a starting place but one milestone in an even
longer historical process that began earlier in the 18th century (or in
16th, if we take the Reformation into account).

There is a great deal of room for disagreement about how to interpret
the language and very little hard evidence, in this instance, what the
men in the congressional committee to wrote those particular words
wanted them to mean.

If James Madison was right (I haven't a citation to his comment at hand)
in stating that the real authority for the meaning of the Bill of Rights
was to be found in the opinions of the men who ratified it (the members
of the state legislatures) that may mean that the paucity of surviving
discussions about what those amendments meant to the ratifiers leaves us
with little or no authority for discovering original intent from the
text or from the records of the creation or ratification of the text.

When it comes to understanding the Constitution, that's scarcely
unprecedented.

One more thing before packing my tent and silently stealing away for the
weekend:

James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance and his Detached Memoranda
contain very clear statements of his ideas about church and state, and
because he, not Thomas Jefferson, was there when the First Amendment was
being put through Congress, I think that he, not Jefferson, ought to be
looked to more often for understanding what the one most influential man
at the center of those events thought was going on.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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