Re-establishment clause
I was wondering when this topic was going to be raised. Watching the beautiful ceremonies for President Ford in and around churches and national monuments, hearing traditional hymns and anthems intermingled, and seeing his final service held at the National Cathedral with so many of the nation’s prominent government leaders, I thought how nice it was to have a break from the unnecessary church/state divisiveness we suffered through in recent years.
Ed Whelan, at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, raised that thought to the consideration of just who was present at that funeral and the significance of the Cathedral service.
Tuesday’s beautiful state funeral for former president Gerald R. Ford at the Washington National Cathedral was, as the Washington Post aptly put it, “”a classic Washington affair, soaked in power and pageantry,” that memorably defined Ford’s legacy. The solemnity of the Christian burial rite, from its opening words — “With faith in Jesus Christ, we receive the body of our brother Gerald for burial” — through the many prayers, readings from Scripture, and homily, to the dismissal “in the name of Christ,” surely magnified the impact of the funeral on the millions of Americans who viewed it.
Ford’s state funeral stands in sharp counterpoint to Ford’s statement last year that he was “prepared to allow history’s judgment” of his presidency to rest exclusively on his appointment of Justice John Paul Stevens — and that he specifically agreed with Stevens’s positions on the establishment clause. For the ceremony at National Cathedral that Ford himself so carefully planned could never have taken place as it did — and probably could not have occurred at all — if Stevens’s radically secularist misreading of the establishment clause were governing law.
In every major establishment-clause case during his three decades on the Court, Stevens has concluded that government policies that accommodate or support religion are unconstitutional, even if they are an accepted part of our political and cultural heritage. In the 1983 case of Marsh v. Chambers, for example, Stevens dissented from the Court’s holding that it was constitutionally permissible for a state legislature to open its session with a prayer by a chaplain paid by the state. Even more aggressively and idiosyncratically, Stevens has opined that a legislative declaration of the biological fact that human life begins at conception violates the establishment clause.
Ford’s state funeral is impossible to reconcile with Stevens’s extremist views of the establishment clause…
Moreover, the very existence of the National Cathedral ought to be constitutionally objectionable in Stevens’s eyes. The National Cathedral is part of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation, which was chartered by an Act of Congress, signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1893, “for the promotion of religion and education and charity.”
Justice Stevens was among the powerful who were present at the final rites of the president who appointed him to the Court. One can only hope that he might have recognized that those rites were a resounding repudiation of his misguided establishment-clause views.
In these final months or years before his anticipated retirement, maybe turning around those misguided views can be Steven’s legacy, the way Stevens was Ford’s.
