Fundies always annoy me, but this is a particular rant that's on my mind at the moment. They don't understand the Establishment Clause. Sometimes I don't even think they know it exists.
Whenever a story comes up about someone suing to have a piece of religious iconography taken out of a public building, the fundie idiots always put forth three arguments:
1. Why does the minority get to dictate to the majority? This seems to be based on their belief that the Constitution doesn't exist, and that the majority always has the right to get what it wants. This belief, is, as usual, selectively applied, because at all other times, fundies (claim to) worship the Constitution as if it were the third Tablet of Moses.
2. You don't have a right not to be offended! And of course, all the slippery slope/reductio ad absurdum arguments that flow from it, such as "Well, suppose some day I decide I'm offended by the color blue. Do we have to then take all blue books out of the library?"
Of course, the fundies can't seem to grasp what, exactly, a lawsuit is. It is an allegation that some statute, constitutional principle, or legal provision is being or has been violated. "I am offended" is not a law. It is not, cannot, and never will be the basis for a lawsuit. No one ever sued a public school because the Ten Commandments on the wall offended them. Rather, they sued because the Ten Commandments on the wall violated the Establishment Clause. Why fundies can't seem to grasp this is beyond me. Maybe because pretending someone sued over being offended is easier for them to attack.
3. You know, there is no "Separation of Church and State" in the Constitution. The phrase comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist convention in 1802 blah blah blah... This one is usually trotted out somewhere around 5 or 6 comments deep, by the local fundie who most fancies himself a scholar. He thinks he's really showing us with his deep historical knowledge, because God knows, we've never heard that line before.
And he sure would be showing us, if anyone ever sued for a "violation of the separation of church and state." Except, since that doesn't exist, nobody has ever sued over that. And if Mr. History here would ever read a complaint, he'd know that.
