Nashville News Blog

Mr. Hargrove,

When people defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, were they taking First Amendment Rights to "absurdist levels?"

Are people who argue (against the majority of American History) that prayer in schools and nativity scenes on public property are violations of the First Amendment, taking the First Amendment to "absurdist levels?"

You seem to be cavalier with other people's Rights but would you feel the same when it was a Right you value?

Rather than demonize the advocates of gun rights, why not make the argument that guns in parks is bad public policy and conflicts with other Rights?

Nice, Rogers, and written like an Englishman mounting a soapbox. As if honest comparisons can actually be made to Nazis.

How about a little common sense application to all things? For example: It's a bad idea to have guns in places that sell alcohol. Even Wyatt Earp knew that.

Mr. Rogers, prayer in public schools in (organized by school leaders) is clearly unconstitutional. No debate. The fact that it may have been practiced in the past is irrelevant. The meaning of the 2nd Amendment is far more debatable.

I don't know, Mark. I think last I read, some 70 percent of Americans favor abortion. That figure's probably not true of Tennessee, but I'd bet it's a lot higher than we imagine. I think a lot of what we presume to be popular isn't exactly so, largely because our views are shaped by who talks the loudest. I would imagine the legislature thought its guns-in-bars bill would be very popular, because those are the people legislators talk to. But once it passed, it's quickly become an "oh shit" moment, with the biggest opposition coming not from lefties, but from business people who have to deal with it.

I also think prayer in school would have difficulty passing in most of the country, just because it's more religiously diverse than we are here, and the battle would then begin over whose prayers we're going to recite.

I can't speak for Brantley -- I think he actually owns guns -- but I'm on the other side of this coin, Mark. I think the proliferation of guns has only lead to more violence, as evidenced by America's gun murder rate when compared to the rest of the industrialized world. So I'd be in favor of sweeping restrictions.

But that, of course, is just a pipe dream, since gun rights are one of the Republicans' favorite wedge issues, and Democrats, the cowardly lions they are, are far too dainty to contest it.

But I do think we in Tennessee overestimate how much things like school prayer resonate in the rest of the country. I think most of the older, mainline sects find conspicuous Christianity unseemly and a violation of modesty. I realize it would probably pass by wide margins in the rural areas and the cities of the south, but I think in the northern and West Coast metro areas -- basically the areas Obama won -- it would get crushed. Evangelicals are very small players in the those parts, and they've been religiously diverse for a century or more. The Catholics, Jews, white mainlines, Muslims and black Methodists learned long ago not to step on each others toes if they're going to get along. And there's pretty widespread distrust of the evangelicals, the people who usually push these things.

Either way, always good to hear from you, Mark.

"Mr. Rogers, prayer in public schools in (organized by school leaders) is clearly unconstitutional. No debate."

Unless you can point to some text in the Constitution wherein it literally and explicitly states that orgainized prayer in public schools is forbidden, then it's not "clearly" any such thing.

Otherwise, it is a matter of interpretation of the words that ARE in there.

And the common understanding of what the ratifers understood the words to mean at the time of ratifification is the only interpretation that matters - not what you or anyone else wants them to mean today.