Christopher, Blue, nihil -- Thank you all for your responses to my question, which was, as you recall, why were the states initially left free to legislate matters of religion?
A couple of comments:
1) Exploring the website you recommended, Blue, I found the text of an 1829 work by one William Rawle, entitled View of the Constitution. It is described as follows:
Early commentary on the Constitution and how it should be interpreted. Made point that the Bill of Rights also applied to the states, something that would later be denied, then partially reassserted by the 14th A 14th Amendment and the doctrine of (selective) incorporation.
Now, I am no constitutional scholar, but it sounds to me as if there was some debate from the outset over the question of whether the Bill of Rights did and/or should apply to the states.
After all, common sense forces one to ask: what good is a guarantee of rights in the federal Constitution if those rights can be violated with impunity on the state level? After all, I live in a particular state. And if I want to open up a Buddhist temple, say, and the state I live in restricts Buddhism, then the "free exercise" clause in the federal constitution is of no practical use to me whatsoever -- unless the Bill of Rights was meant to apply to the states as well as to the federal government.
2) You folks really addressed the "what," but not the "why." What I was after was an explanation of the rationale for "leaving it up" to the states.
I see quite a few possible explanations, including the folllowing, suggested to me by reading the passage on the First Amendment in Chapter X of the Rawle book.
The Founders may have assumed, among other things, that the states would follow in the footsteps of the federal government (which itself had followed in Rhode Island's footsteps). All through the revolutionary period the states had been dropping religious restrictions, and it would have been perfectly sensible to assume the process would continue (as it did).
Joan |
