JULY 29, 2020
Donald Trump‘s legal adviser, notorious anti-LGBTQ bigot Jenna Ellis (below), made news last month when she reacted to a tweet about how “white European” Jesus monuments needed to come down with a whiny statement equating that with people trying to “cancel Christianity.”
Ellis hasn’t stopped saying idiotic things since then, and that’s very disturbing considering how she has the ear of the president.
According to Andrew Kirell of the Daily Beast, during a Zoom event Monday night sponsored by “Asian Pacific Americans for Trump,” Ellis claimed church/state separation was nothing more than a hoax.
“The left is going to tell you there’s this separation of church and state, and that’s just nowhere in the Constitution, nowhere in American law,” Jenna Ellis declared… “That’s nothing that our founding principles ever, uh, derived whatsoever.”
The concept of a firewall between church and state authorities, Ellis claimed, is a mere “twisting a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Church that was simply talking about the three tiers of authority that God himself ordained — the church government, the civil government, and the family government.”
Jesus Christ, how does a “legal adviser” not even understand the application of the First Amendment…? Ellis is either a horrible lawyer or she’s playing the part of one. I’m not sure which one would make me feel better.
While the phrase itself isn’t in the Constitution, the principle has held true when judges interpret the Establishment Clause. When the Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the English version of that has repeatedly meant the government must stay out of religious matters and not play favorites. That’s what separation of church and state means.
That’s not a liberal distortion. It’s longstanding jurisprudence.
But this wasn’t even the first time Ellis said something like this:
Ellis has made such an argument before. In late April, while reacting to local bans on church gatherings amid the coronavirus pandemic, she argued that “‘separation of church and state’ is a myth perpetuated by liberals to pretend morality and religion cannot be part of government.”
Leave it to a conservative Christian, who works for an administration that only cares about conservative Christians, to claim church/state separation ought to be ignored. It’s easy to dismiss that separation when the government is elevating your faith, but Ellis and other Christians like her would be the first ones whining if a president ever treated Muslims or atheists the same way Donald Trump treats white evangelicals.
(Screenshot via YouTube. Thanks to Brian for the link)