Freedom From Religion
The Establishment Clause seems to be one of the least-understood parts of the US Constitution. Though whether that misunderstanding is borne out of true confusion or willful ignorance—or in some extreme cases, the practice of historical revisionism1—is debatable.
The First Amendment contains several important ideas, that we call clauses. In full, the First Amendment reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The Establishment Clause is broken out as the part that says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” To understand what this means, we have different methods of interpretation. Without going into too much detail on statutory construction, I would like to argue one of the most compelling points to consider in interpretation is that we “must presume that a legislature says in a statute what it means and means in a statute what it says.” Connecticut Nat’l Bank v. Germain, 112 S. Ct. 1146, 1149 (1992).
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