Attribution: National Archives at College Park – Still Pictures , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
“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 First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, The Constitution of the United States
A lot of Americans have been citing the Constitution as if it’s the Bible; and just in the same way they quote (or misquote) the Bible, some bend the words of our founding fathers to fit their own sometimes narrow agendas. Homosexuality is condemned in the Bible. Fundamentalists and Christian Nationalists love reminding us of that, but they choose to ignore the fact that eating shellfish, getting tattoos, or eating pork is also prohibited in the good book. Remember that when you see these guys eating at Red Lobster.
The same is true of the Constitution. Some citizens choose to cherry-pick (or ignore) the stated intentions of our founding fathers. Conservatives aligned with Christian Nationalists love to say that our founding fathers wanted to create a Christian nation when in fact, the opposite is true.
According to CNN’s Amanda Tyler, “Christian Nationalism relies heavily on a false narrative of America as a ‘“Christian nation,”’ founded by Christians in order to privilege Christianity. This mythical history betrays the work of the framers to create a federal government that would remain neutral when it comes to religion” (CNN).
It’s all there in black and white, but try telling that to Lauren Boebert or Marjory Taylor Green or Ron DeSantis, all avowed Christian nationalists. They’ll defer, deny, and decry the fact that our founders wanted no religion anywhere near the seat of government.
The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights states that Congress shall not interfere in the free exercise of religion. Green and Boebert simply love that part, but they choose to willfully disregard the “wall of separation” clause that keeps church out of the government. And of course, the phrase “any religion” does not imply (in their tiny narrow minds) that Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism—or anything else—is included in that phrase. America is Christian. Right? Just ask the folks up at Hillsdale College in the Project 2025 lab.
This constitutional cherry-picking is not only applied to religious rights—or non-rights. Selective constitutionalists also like to interpret the freedom of the press as sort of a suggestion rather than an actual law.
Now the government and the press have not always seen eye to eye, but that’s sort of the point. The function of the free press has been to inform the public, to ferret out and report stories of corruption, mismanagement, and criminality in the government, big business, and society in general. They are our watchdogs.
At different points in our history, muckrakers have exposed corporate negligence in the meat industry and the railroads; abuses in the labor force—including child labor; and coverups like Watergate and the Iran Contra scandals. According to the Constitution, the government has no power “to abridge the press”. That hasn’t stopped them from trying. Between The Pentagon Papers and Watergate, Nixon did his best to shut down the Washington Post but couldn’t because that freedom is protected by the Constitution.
Apparently, according to Donald Trump and company, that interpretation of the First Amendment is wrong. Trump has made a career out of berating the press, coining the term “fake news” to smear any reporting (usually on mainstream media) that he does not agree with. Since beginning his second term, according to Reporters Without Borders, President Trump has personally sued ABC (which regrettably settled), CBS, the Des Moines Register, Gannett, and the Pulitzer Center over what he considered biased coverage. The Register displeased him by publishing a poll showing him trailing Kamala Harris shortly before the 2024 election—so he sued them. It doesn’t take much to piss off the Donald.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC chair and Project 2025 contributor, has launched obviously politically motivated investigations into Disney, ABC, Comcast, NPR, and PBS. The president is also attempting to cut off federal funding to NPR and PBS. When a reporter from AP asked him a question he didn’t like, the president (illegally—but that’s probably redundant) banned the respected news organization from the White House press pool.
Since the Washington Post was purchased by Trump’s billionaire buddy Jeff Bezos,
Combined with Trump’s personally owned Social Media platform—his venting board—and conservative media outlets like Fox News and OAN, which might generously be termed as tilting right—and which he installed into Pentagon press offices, it seems obvious our free press is under siege.
To their credit, editors and reporters (for the most part) remain uncowed. Political cartoonist Ann Talneas resigned after an editor rejected a sketch of billionaires (including Bezos) bowing down before Trump with bags of money. Before the 2024 election, the Post refused to endorse a presidential candidate—a surprising move. After Trump’s electoral victory, Mr. Bezos restricted topics covered by its opinion page to “personal liberties” and the “free market”, prompting opinions editor David Shipley to resign (AP).
How else will this administration continue to rewrite the Constitution? The First Amendment also guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”.
So far, Trump’s reckless and dangerous attempts to dismantle our democracy have ignited huge nationwide—make that worldwide—protests. When his main donor and chief lackey Elon Musk unleashed his teenaged DOGE upon the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Administration, NOAA, the National Institute of Health, the National Park Service, fired thousands of federal workers, and is presently threatening to cut Medicaid, the American people rose up in outrage. Mass protests in large cities as well as mostly Republican-based rural areas in deep-red states like Arkansas, Oklahoma, Montana, and Utah have shown just how much Americans like these programs, which unfortunately begs the question of how long it will be before this administration starts trying to suppress this constitutional right.
Will they start using the DOJ to go after activists? Will they physically try to suppress demonstrations or try to instigate violence in the streets? Time will tell.
Paging further down into the Bill of Rights, we can see that this administration has already been blatantly disregarding the provisions of the Fifth Amendment regarding due process, shipping American citizens off to a brutal maximum-security prison in El Salvador with no hearing, arraignment, or trial. Defying a series of court orders, the administration has refused to repatriate Kilmar Obrega Garcia, who was mistakenly deported. Hundreds of other citizens are still being arrested and detained without reason.
If this administration and the Christian nationalists who back it and who are deeply involved in the Project 2025 effort to transform America into the new Gilead are allowed to continue their illegal and immoral reinterpretations of the Constitution as they have reinterpreted the Bible in their narrow-minded, bigoted, and hateful way, we will no longer have a Bill or Rights—or any rights.
The separation of church and state, the free press, our rights to demonstrate and petition the government are under attack. They must be preserved or America as we know this will cease to exist.
Notes
- https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_actions_prohibited_by_the_Bible
- https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/27/opinions/christian-nationalism-marjorie-taylor-greene-tyler
- https://rsf.org/en/trump-s-war-press-10-numbers-us-president-s-first-100-days
- https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-trump-bezos-cartoonist-resigns-53928aadc4fb4dda8f35fd840b5717ac
- https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-bezos-opinion-trump-market-liberty-97a7d8113d670ec6e643525fdf9f06de
- https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution
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