Law & Error: Fred Thompson Misunderstands High Court’s Church-State Rulings

In a recent speech to the Council for National Policy (CNP), former U.S. senator and presidential possibility Fred Thompson showed a remarkable misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s church-state rulings.

Thompson chided the federal courts for overreaching their bounds and for distorting the intent of the Constitution.

“Our founders,” Thompson said, “established an independent federal judiciary to decide cases, not social policy.  Yet more and more that is exactly what it is doing.  Roe v. Wade is a classic example.  And nowhere is it more apparent than with regard to the issue of church and state. 

“Many federal judges,” he continued, “seem intent on eliminating God from the public schools and the public square in ways that would astound our founding fathers. We never know when a five-to-four Supreme Court decision will uphold them. They ignore the fact that the founders were protecting the church from the state and not the other way around.”

Now, Thompson is a lawyer — and he plays a lawyer on television (NBC’s “Law & Order”) — but he seems to have missed constitutional law class. Maybe he was studying acting that semester.

Here are the facts: There are no federal judges who are trying to “eliminate God” from the public schools or the public square. The Supreme Court’s decisions on religion and public education simply say that parents, not politicians or educators, get to decide what prayers children learn and what holy scriptures they study devotionally.

That’s keeping government out of our personal lives, a concept that ought to resonate with real conservatives as well as liberals. Far from being astounded, Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would be thrilled that the country is upholding freedom of conscience. 

Thompson is also wrong about the intent of the First Amendment. It was meant to protect the church from the state and to keep the church from controlling the state. In Jefferson and Madison’s day, the danger came from both directions. Back then (as now) state persecution of dissenters came at the behest of powerful state-aligned religious interests. For example, in Virginia, Baptist preachers were jailed because the state-established Anglican Church wanted its privileges protected.

But Thompson’s misguided assertions probably went over well with the theocrats at the CNP. That secretive group has been plotting behind closed doors since 1981 to turn our nation into a fundamentalist theocracy.

News reports indicated that Thompson was to be introduced at the May 12 CNP meeting at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., by none other than Richard Land, chief lobbyist of the tax-exempt Southern Baptist Convention. Land and other fundamentalist leaders are desperately searching for a GOP candidate who can successfully carry the Religious Right flag into the battle in 2008. 

Land thinks Thompson is the chosen one, calling him a “southern-fried Reagan.” Unfortunately, Land’s erstwhile colleague, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, has declared that Thompson is “not a Christian,” which complicates any immediate coronation. Dobson seems to be tilting toward former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who confessed on Dobson’s show to moral failings in his marriage and repented of them.

In the wake of Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell’s death, pundits will undoubtedly proclaim the demise of the Religious Right. The ongoing power of that movement in Republican Party is evidence that it remains a force to be reckoned with.

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