Justice Scalia: “The Government Needs to Support Religious Expressions”
/*Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently spoke at Archbishop Rummel High School, a Catholic school in New Orleans. “Speaking before a small crowd, Scalia delivered a short but provocative speech on religious freedom that saw the conservative Catholic take aim at those who confuse freedom of religion for freedom from it.”
Justice Scalia has been a strong supporter for a conservative reading of the First Amendment. In Scalia’s view, “the courts should interpret it based on the text itself, which doesn’t expressly prohibit government support for religion, and common practice.”
“When the Constitution was written, “religion was ubiquitous. Scalia noted that Thomas Jefferson, who first invoked the idea of a ‘wall of separation between church and state,’ also penned Virginia’s religious freedom law, founded a university with dedicated religious space and, in writing the Declaration of Independence, regularly invoked God.”
In his closing statement he said, “America’s constitutional tradition that says government cannot favor religious expression in public life. To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from?”