The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

Article six of the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment states “no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Article six is, in my opinion, a significant Constitutional flaw. The 1st Amendment would have better served the national interest had it mandated freedom ‘from’ religion, instead of freedom ‘of religion.’ A case in point is the pervasive influence of a dominant religion within the Supreme Court.

Six of the nine justices sitting on our Supreme Court, Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, Kavannaugh and Coney Barrett, are adherents to Catholic dogma. That’s a potent conservative voting bloc whose every legal decision must surely be influenced to some degree by the authority of the powerful church that demands their fealty.

Should such an ethically biased court be hearing arguments on abortion when Vatican dogma condemns divorce, birth control, and abortion as well as women’s gender equality within that church?

This could have been averted had the constitution mandated religious testing for public office seekers. Weeding out candidates more committed to the religious doctrines of their church than to the ethics of secular justice, would have kept our Supreme Court free of sectarian religious influence.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island