Historical Perspective

I guess I have to admit that most Americans are stupid. Or, rather, not stupid, but uneducated. They don't pay attention in their History classes and they don't understand why America was founded and on what principles.

The First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are there, and are numbers 1 and 2, for a reason. The United States was founded by people who, for the most part, were fleeing religious persecution in the nations they left. Those nations (England, Spain, Italy, among others) were ruled by a theocracy, whether instituted or de facto. If you spoke out about the religion, if you dared to practice a different religion, if you dared to dissent at all, you could be arrested, held without hope of release, and even killed for those beliefs and actions.

When the founding fathers of America sat down to write the laws of the nation, they knew this. They remembered this. They wanted America to be a place of freedom, where anyone could practice his/her religion freely and without fear. They wanted a place where the people made the decisions, not the government. They wanted a place where, if the government started dictating, the people could rise up and change it.

So, that led directly to the verbiage of the First Amendment:

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.

This amendment specifically gave everyone the right to practice what they wanted to, to peacefully assemble, and to express their opinions about anything at all, including issues with the government, without being persecuted for it, like many of those who founded the nation were in their original countries.

In order for the First Amendment to work, however, the founding fathers knew there must be a way to enforce it. For the people to feel safe and for the people to depose the government, if needed. And that led directly to the Second Amendment.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The founders wanted people to be able to fight for their freedoms, both against those who would invade the newly-formed nation and against those who would make that nation into something it wasn't intended to be. They left the amendment vague enough so that it encompassed many reasons and situations. Since then, the Supreme Court has had to rule on the intent behind the amendment on a number of occasions. However, the problem with intent is that any interpretation now is biased by the issues we face now. Now we have problems with a plethora of mass shootings, so we are biased by the end-results we want, so people want to do away with the Second Amendment. But the problems of the First Amendment, and those who want to do away with that, prove that the Second Amendment is still needed.

The separation of church and state that is implied by the First Amendment goes one of two ways: either you don't include any religion in your state dealings, buildings, etc., OR you allow any religion to have equal representation. So, for example, when a group wants to put the 10 Commandments on statuary within a government building, there are actually two responses the people can make: to remove that statue and disallow any religious displays OR to allow any religion the right to put its own, similar statuary in the same building. In this way, the government is neither establishing a religion (by showing preference for one above all others) nor is it restricting the free exercise of any other religion. It just seems easier to disallow the first statue than it does to allow any number of other religions, doesn't it?

I will not deny, nor do I think will any constitutional scholar, that America was primarily founded by people of a Christian background. And yet, the founding fathers still put the First Amendment in place, and made it number one. They recognized that even among Christians there were a lot of differences in beliefs. A Catholic, for example, sees the world and its religion slightly differently from, say, a Lutheran. Both of those religions see things a bit differently from the Adventist, Mormon, and other movements. Our founding fathers, especially such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, among others, were well-read and well-traveled, so they had experienced many other religions beyond the various swaths of Christianity. They wrote the Bill of Rights with intent.

Many people today take the fact that our Pledge of Allegiance and our money reference God as a sign from the founding fathers. Few realize that those were added in the 1950s! They haven't always been around, and were put in place, along with other, similar references, in response to the growing "threat" of Communism. Today, many will claim we have a growing threat from Islam... and they are calling for similar measures to protect the nation. What goes around, comes around.

In the end, the First and Second Amendments are two of the most important laws we have in America. They are first and second on purpose and with intent. And they are forever linked together, as one powers and allows the other. Whenever a leader questions the needs for one or the other, whenever he/she wants to change or abolish one or the other, you should question why and ask yourself if that person understands the history of this great nation and why those two amendments were the first two put into the Bill of Rights by the founders of America. You might just come to the conclusion that either that leader doesn't know his history or that he has some sort of ulterior motive behind his reasoning... and one that can start a slippery slope that ends with America no longer being the free state it was meant to be.