Letter to the Editor: First Amendment clarification

By PATRICK N. SUNDSTROM Emery

Editor,
Having read Mr. Wright’s scathing critique of my reply, I thought perhaps I would be wasting my time in responding again. But then I decided people like Mr. Wright, who have obviously had the benefit of a first rate college indoctrination, not education, need a response.
Liberals like Mr. Wright, love to quote only the parts of the Constitution that serve their purposes. Mr. Wright, while quoting one part of the First Amendment regarding the establishment of religion, forgot to include the phrase, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The phrase “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion” was put there for one purpose. That purpose was to keep the government from establishing a state religion, which the founders were trying to escape when the left England and Europe.
It was not intended to keep religious symbols from being displayed in public or to keep a high school valedictorian from mentioning Jesus in his commencement address, which the ACLU loves to sue over. People like Mr. Wright ignore the original intent of the framers and seem eager to give a bunch of lawyers in black robes the final say on all of our legal rights.
Mr. Wright writes he is no liberal. That’s fine except I can’t remember a conservative comparing President Bush to Hitler as Mr. Wright did in his response. Mr. Wright goes on and on with his claims of how the president is damaging the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Well, I would like to provide Mr. Wright and your readers with a quick history lesson. During World War II, President Roosevelt ordered the detention of more than 50,000 Americans of Japanese descent who had done nothing wrong, every single piece of mail going in and out of the country during the war was opened and read by the government and virtually everything anyone did that was suspicious was investigated and acted on.
Our Constitution and Bill of Rights survived despite all of this. The reason it survived was because back then America knew how to fight a war and understood what protecting the country meant. People like Mr. Wright remained silent because they understood what the consequences of losing the war were. They also knew the government would not tolerate their cowardice and sedition as it does now.
As for Mr. Wrights concern over the poor terrorists at Gitmo and his comparing them to Timothy McVeigh, I must again reiterate that unlike Timothy McVeigh, the terrorists are not American citizens and are not afforded the Constitutional protection he was. That is a desperately inadequate comparison.
In closing, I would like to remind Mr. Wright and your readers who don’t already get it that the enemy is Islamic Fascism, not George W. Bush.