Michelle MacDonald, the Republican nominee for the Minnesota Supreme Court who neglected to disclose her upcoming trial for driving while intoxicated, is now being slammed for promising to base her opinions on Biblical principles rather than U.S. law.
During a speech MacDonald gave at the Minnesota Republican convention in Rochester last month, she told delegates that “when judges used to enter the courtroom, they would hold a Bible over their head, like this,” and then held a Bible over her head as delegates heartily applauded.
“In the words of George Washington,” she continued, “it is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” That quote would be a powerful endorsement of her position, except for one tiny detail: according to Mount Vernon Library, George Washington never said that. The spurious quotation is “frequently misattributed to Washington, particularly in regards to his farewell address of 1796.”
MacDonald’s attempt to be one of Minnesota’s most powerful jurists while lashing her religious beliefs to her interpretation of the law is all the more embarrassing because of the centuries old American legal principle of separation of church and state reflected in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
For wisdom on the proper relationship between government and religion, one might look instead to what founding father Thomas Jefferson had to say about the subject. While Jefferson was a follower of Jesus’ teachings, he wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people, which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
July 8, 2014 6:59 AM
