The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
For Reference and Further Reading
Hallihan, C. P. 2010. The Authorised Version: A Wonderful and Unfinished History. London: Trinitarian Bible Society.
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Abington v. Schempp (1963)
Just a year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the daily recitation of a prayer in public schools in Engel v. Vitale, the court extended this prohibition to a daily reading from the Bible by students without comment. This practice had been challenged by the Schempp family in Pennsylvania, who were Unitarians, and by Madalyn Murray and her son in Maryland, who were professed atheists. Although generally using the King James Version of the Bible, both school districts had permitted the use of alternate translations and had exempted students who chose not to participate.
Justice Tom Clark delivered the majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court based on the establishment clause of the First Amendment as applied to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the states had argued that the practice of reading the Bible was designed to perpetuate such secular purposes as “the promotion of moral values, the contradiction to the materialistic trends of our times, the perpetuation of our institutions and the teaching of literature” (1963, 223), Clark observed,
Surely the place of the Bible as an instrument of religion cannot be gainsaid, and the State’s recognition of the pervading religious character of the ceremony is evident from the rule’s specific permission of the alternative use of the Catholic Douay version as well as the recent amendment permitting nonattendance at the exercises. None of these factors is consistent with the contention that the Bible is here used either as an instrument for nonreligious moral inspiration or as a reference for the teaching of secular subjects. (1963, 224).
Accepting that the practice of Bible reading might be considered a fairly “minor” encroachment of the First Amendment, Clark feared that a breach “that is today a trickling stream may all too soon become a raging torrent” (1963, 225).
Clark did indicate that the court’s decision was not intended to prevent the teaching of the Bible as part of “comparative religion or the history of religion”: “It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment” (225).
Justice William Brennan’s concurring opinion is frequently quoted. He noted that Bible reading and prayer had long been part of the public school curriculum, but that education had changed substantially as had its religious makeup. He observed that individuals like Horace Mann had once contrasted reading the Bible to what they considered to be more “sectarian” practices (270). However, even though “the religious aims of the educators who adopted and retained such exercises were comprehensive, and in many cases quite devoid of 2sectarian bias . . . the crucial fact is that they were nonetheless religious” (271). Surveying past controversies at the state level that had involved Bible reading in schools, Brennan cited a variety of decisions that had decided to ban the practice. Although he did not doubt that morning devotional exercises might have some secular benefits, he observed, “To the extent that only religious materials will serve this purpose, it seems to me that the purpose as well as the means is so plainly religious that the exercise is necessarily forbidden by the Establishment Clause” (280). He observed that there were even devout Christians who found public readings of the Bible to be offensive and that attempts to excuse children from such devotional exercises often stigmatized them. Like the majority, however, Brennan did not think the decision foreclosed “teaching about the Holy Scriptures or about the differences between religious sects in classes in literature or history” (300).
Justice Potter Stewart, who wrote the only dissenting opinion, believed that it should be possible to maintain Bible readings without having them seem coercive or stigmatizing to those who did not participate.
The majority’s decision in this case was consistent with an earlier decision in McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), in which the Supreme Court had outlawed use of public school facilities to provide religious instruction. In Zorach v. Clauson (1952), the court had permitted so-called released time arrangements in which public school children were dismissed during the school day for such instruction at off-campus sites.
See also Bible Reading in Public Schools
For Reference and Further Reading
Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 202 (1963).
The Bible in the Public Schools. 1870. Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke Reprint; New York: Da Capo Press, 1967. Introduction by Robert G. McCloskey.
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).
McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948).
Zorach v. Clauson, 343 306 (1952).
Abortion
Conflicts over governmental regulations of abortion in the United States have been among the most contentious of any that have roiled American law and politics in the last fifty years. Long the subject of common law decisions and varied state regulations, which had eased in many states, the U.S. Supreme Court entered the area with its path-breaking decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, which allowed most abortions through the first and second trimesters of pregnancy and some during the third. The decision has failed to stop the debate between abortion opponents, who describe themselves as pro-life, and those, describing themselves as pro-choice, who believe the decision is one to be made by a woman and her doctor. A leading scholar of constitutional law refers to this conflict as “the clash of absolutes” (Tribe 1990).
Striking down a Texas law limiting abortion, the court, in an opinion authored by Justice Harry Blackmun, noted that there was wide disagreement over the status of a fetus, but that the reference to persons in the Fourteenth 3Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (“all persons born or naturalized in the United States”) appeared to refer to postnatal life. In examining abortion laws in U.S. history, Blackmun concluded that most had been enacted to protect the lives of expectant women at a time prior to antiseptics, when the risk of abortion was often greater than the risk of childbearing. Conceiving of the protection of women as the primary goal of such laws, Blackmun thought that modern science now made abortion much safer. In a complex ruling, he thus ruled that a woman should have an unfettered right to abortion during the first trimester (three months) of pregnancy, that the state could enact legislation to ensure that women’s health was protected during such procedures during the second trimester, and that only in the third trimester (the point during which a fetus would be viable outside the womb) would the state be able to limit abortion, albeit with exceptions for cases involving the life or health of the mother.
In