Dr. Phil reveals why this Supreme Court case could upend religious freedom

The first words of the First Amendment to the US Constitution are: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”That’s pretty clear.We know what Congress is.

We know what a law is.We know what religion is.But too often people have interpreted this to mean that government and religion must be completely separate — which was not the intention.On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a case that challenges this belief, and could allow states to be free once again to enact religious policies they believe best serve their citizens.Justices in the past have noted that the Establishment Clause’s whole purpose was to protect states from federal action on matters of religion.The most respected justice of his time, Joseph Story, wrote in 1833 the Establishment Clause’s “real object” was “to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment,” by leaving “the whole power over the subject of religion .

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exclusively to the state governments.”Yet the Supreme Court ruled in 1947 that the Establishment Clause, which limits what Congress can do, also limits what states can do.It did so by invoking the 14th Amendment, which says: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”Never mind the Establishment Clause did not create a right in any individual but rather protected the states’ right.As Sen.Mike Lee points out in his book “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document,” later Supreme Court justices — such as Potter Stewart and Clarence Thomas — noted the irony of using the Establishment Clause’s language, designed to protect state laws on religion, as a weapon to nullify those same laws.So how did the Supreme Court do such a thing? The story rests on the shoulders of Justice Hugo Black — a former avowed Ku Klux Klan member who incorporated its stated goal of eliminating Catholic parochial schools into an...