Civil Rights And Liberties Case Analysis

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Chirag N. Rao Political Science Essay#2, Topic= the Civil Rights and the Liberties Scenarios, Due= Thursday, February 19th, 2015 The hearing of an appeal to post Ten Commandments on the walls of a public or government building is an interesting case, whose relevance goes back to the famous phrase, namely, “Separation of Church and State”. Roots of this phrase can be traced all the way back to a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in January of 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. Though the First Amendment clause against establishment of religion by law was to ensure that there was separation between religion and government, various courts to this day are still hearing cases and this remain an ongoing subject of interpretation and perspectives. I believe this is so because the various court decisions and legislation such as First Amendment, Lemon Test, Civil Rights and Liberties make it ambivalent between separation of religion and that of freedom to practice religion. I believe the best way to arrive at a decision is to analyze the relevance of each one of them individually and then review some past famous cases that have dealt with similar scenario. Let us begin with the First Amendment, which among other things essentially prohibits making any law that will respect an establishment of religion or restrict the freedom to exercise religion. The first part is dealt under a clause known as the Establishment Clause and the second part is dealt under Free Exercise Clause. As a matter of fact these are the two main religion clauses of the First Amendment. At the time these clauses were written in 1798 by Congressman Fisher Ames, it did not prevent the government to enter the religious domain to make accommodations for people to observe their religion and practices so as to uphold the freedom to exercise clause. If one were to go strictly based on this interpretation of the First Amendment, they could argue that restricting the posting of Ten Commandments infringes their right to exercise freedom of religion or religious expression. The Lemon test was formulated by Chief Justice Warren Burger in the majority opinion in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). From the perspective of any implication of the Civil Liberties through Bill Of Rights and Civil Rights Act of 1964 on this case, one has to understand the core purpose of this act. Essentially this act basically ensures one’s ability to be involved in the civil and political life of society and state without worrying about getting discriminated. In other words they protect people from discrimination such as race, sex or gender, color, religion, ethnicity, etc. It was primarily designed to end …show more content…
Two prominent landmark cases that can be taken into consideration are namely Engel v. Vitale 370 U.S. 421 (1962) and Lemon v. Kurtzman 403 U.S. 602 (1971). The first case, Engel v. Vitale is a case wherein a group of families in New York complained that the voluntary prayer in the mornings violated their religious beliefs. The court ruled through a 6-1 vote that it is unconstitutional for state to compose a prayer and encourage its recitation in public schools as it violated the Establishment Clause. Interestingly the court rejected the defendants even though the prayer was voluntary and did not subscribe to any specific religion. They found that the mere introduction of religion through prayer was sufficient to establish

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