this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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From article VI (3rd paragraph)
"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executige and judicial officers, both of the united states and of the several states, shall be bound by oath of affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
It literally couldn't be any clearer. I guess he's the shittiest constitutional lawyer ever. But nobody will care. They eat up his arguing from authority fallacy bullshit
It's an easy game to play actually. Strict contructionists will only recognize discourse that can be understood in 1790, or whichever relevant time. They use dictionaries from that time and the writings of the amerikan founders to make their points. You won't easily find anything from that era that implies "religion" is anything other than Christianity and it's various sects. To assert otherwise would be to legislate without congress. So they can argue that excluding non-Christians and non-Protestants is in line with the intentions of the authors regardless of article 6.
Is it a perfect line of thinking without contradictions? Of course not, but neither is the counter idea that America was designed to accommodate non-Christians.
A lot of the founders were explicitly not Christian.