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Let's say you're a state and you want, for some reason, to declare an official government religion. You'd probably recall that such behavior runs a bit afoul of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Leaving you with only one option: Decide that your state gets to interpret the Constitution however it sees fit.
This clever, not-at-all-a-slippery-slope strategy is one used by legislators in North Carolina — including the leader of the Republican caucus in the state House — to allow for the adoption of an official religion. The religion isn't named in the bill, but we suspect the choice has been narrowed down to one in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Laura Leslie at North Carolina's WRAL reports (as spotted by Wonkette):
A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide. …
Overtly Christian prayers at government meetings are not rare in North Carolina. Since the Republican takeover in 2011, the state Senate chaplain has offered an explicitly Christian invocation virtually every day of session, despite the fact that some senators are not Christian.
The argument the legislators are making goes like this. The Constitution is the law of the land, Bill of Rights included. However, allowing federal courts to determine what's constitutional is not something explicitly articulated in the document. And since the Tenth Amendment says that anything not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution becomes the province of the states, that means North Carolina can determine for itself what is and isn't unconstitutional. And if it wants to decide that it's officially a Muslim or Jainist or whatever state, it is welcome to do so, because it doesn't think that's unconstitutional. Quod erat demonstratum.