Protecting the Bible, or not

Let's be clear here. I believe the Bible, with proper study and understanding (and what is proper study can be debated at another time), is the most important book we can ever read.

I spend time with it in some form or another seven days a week. I read it. I study it. I talk about it with others. I have several different translations, and I read from many of them each week. I collect old Bibles, and yes, I capitalize it for reasons I'm not quite sure but for reasons that simply feel right as if it was important enough to always be capitalize it.

Yet, I will support the Tennessee governor in his decision to not make the Bible the state book. 

Maybe you read about it. The governor, Bill Haslam, vetoed legislation that would have the Bible the state book. 

Actually the Reuters story said that the legislation would have made the Christian Bible the state's official book, which is in interesting since the Old Testament is, uh, another religions book as well, but we won't argue that at this time.

His reasoning was that it would violate the U.S. Constitution. 

Now, there's the argument. 

One more time, the U.S. Constitution says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

That's it. The separation of Church and state came along basically in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to The Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut that was dated 1802.

Jefferson wrote, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."

That sentence, in a letter by the way, is what has us here after 114 years or so. 

Making the Bible, the Judeo-Christian Bible, the book of a state simply doesn't meet the criteria of not establishing a religion. In other words, making the Bible an official book of a state establishes Christianity (and Judaism for that matter) the state's religion. No matter how we feel about that, no matter how much we believe that to be true, a state can't do that. Now, I understand what is at stake and I understand that this law would be a hedge of state protection against the Koran or any other book of any other religion, but we can't do that by our Constitution's edict.

No matter how it grieves me to agree, this time, wit the ACLU, one can't have elected officials making their official positions to favor one religious belief over another publicly. One can do that privately, and one can express that decision freely.

In fact, it is that very thing that protects our right to worship in the first place.

One can have the Bible sitting in front of us while we deliberate key decisions, have the Bible sitting in front of us as we debate, have the Bible in front of us all day long, but we can't make laws that make the Bible the state book.

Can't do it. That portion of the Constitution is what protects our freedom of religion, and that goes both ways. It always has.