Suppose you decided to leave your entire (modest) estate to your church, and stated so in your will. Upon your death, an insolent and greedy relative, who makes many times more per year than the pastor of the church you named in your will, challenges your will, asking the court to ignore your bequest to the church and to direct your estate be used to supplement this relative's already bloated income. Without any evidence to back his claim, the greedy relative
commits perjury in court by saying you had a "secret" intention to give all your money to the greedy relative instead of to your favorite charity. The court agrees, and gives all your money to the greedy relative, instead of to the church as you had directed in your last will and testament.
Is this a legitimate way to interpret the provisions of your will?
No, it is not. Ask your lawyer.
Imagine instead that the probate court gave all your estate to your greedy relative on the grounds that allowing your estate to go to a church when the court has the power to give it to someone else would be to "endorse" religion by enforcing a will which "discriminates" against atheists and thus violates the "separation of church and state."
Is this a legitimate way to interpret the provisions of your will?
Is this a legitimate way to interpret the constitution?
No. Such a court is not engaging in a legitimate interpretation of your will, Unless your lawyer is a member of the ACLU.
Neither does the U.S. Supreme Court engage in legitimate interpretation of the Constitution, because it's in the pocket of the ACLU.
Interpreting a will or interpreting a constitution is not a matter of what the ACLU thinks is in the will or the constitution, or what greedy relatives WANT to be in the will or the Constitution that's important.
What matters is what YOU directed in your will, or what the Framers of the Constitution themselves said was in the Constitution.
The ACLU would like us to think that the Constitution is "a living constitution," meaning we can construe its provisions in a way that suits US. The Founding Fathers denied this idea.
Madison wrote:
I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution. And if that be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for a consistent and stable, more than for a faithful, exercise of its powers. . . . What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be
taken in its modern sense.
(to Henry Lee, June 25, 1824 [emphasis added])
Our ideas about "religion" have been brainwashed by Secular Humanists and the modern Supreme Court.
All of the Founders agreed that "religion is the duty man owes to his creator" (See Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance.)
But now the US Supreme Court has said that atheism is a religion, and non-belief is entitled to the same protection as belief. This is not what the Founders believed.
We must use their understanding of terms if we are to understand the Constitution. As Jefferson admonished Supreme Court Justice William Johnson:
On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
(June 12, 1823)
US Supreme Court Justice James Wilson, who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, said:
The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it.
(Works, "Lectures on Law Delivered in the College of Phila.; Introductory Lecture: Of the Study of the Law in the United States.")
Sup Ct. Justice Joseph Story, foremost constitutional commentator:
The first and fundamental rule in the interpretation of all instruments is to construe them according to the sense of the terms and the intention of the parties.
Commentaries on the Constitution, (Boston: Hilliard, 1833) vol III, p. 383, sec. 400
You intended to give your estate to your church. That's how to interpret your will.
The Founding Fathers did not intend to give us an atheistic God-free nation. That's how to interpret the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson wrote:
Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, 1823
If we study the history of America, the acts of the Continental Congress, the ratifying debates, the Federalist Papers, and other public writings of the Founders, it becomes obvious that they did not intend to purge God from the public square. It is clear that the nation they founded was in turn founded upon God and His Law.
To say that the thoughts and intentions of the men who drafted the Constitution take second place to the way WE "interpret" the Constitution is to change our government from one of "laws, not of men" to one of silly putty based on contemporary views of political correctness.
The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please.
Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1819
Jefferson on Politics & Government: Interpreting the Constitution
