The Texas Legislature’s Assault on Church-State Separation in Schools

In a legal memorandum that, despite some instances of polemic, offers a helpful discussion of the history of the Supreme Court’s approach to the establishment clause since the 1960s, Sarah Parshall Perry and Jonathan Butcher of the conservative Heritage Foundation argue that Carson clarifies the issue of status versus use.35 They note that prior to the early 2000s, in establishment clause cases in. [...] …The idea that that case is overturning the separation of church and state or rejecting the Establishment Clause, it isn’t at all.”50 Steven Collis, director of both the First Amendment Center and the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, told the Texas Tribune, “Anyone who tells you that the law in this area [that is, church-state separation] is clear, or has ever been. [...] It is up to all of us to decide whether such a vision will, in the words of the Constitution, “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”145 Notes 1 I understand “separation of church and state” to be a constitutional principle summarizing the Constitution’s approach to religion and to religion-state relations, especially as embodied in the “no religious test” clause of Artic. [...] In her entry on separation of church and state in The Oxford Companion to American Politics, Melissa Rogers writes that the phrase “is most commonly used to refer to the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. [...] “The bill even dictates the wording of the Ten Commandments — an abbreviated version of Exodus 20:2–17 from the Kings James Version of the Bible, essentially following the Protestant approach to the Decalogue.