When is a wall not a wall?

...It’s a truth we really do hold self-evident: the existence of a “wall” between church and state-a wall so sturdy and impenetrable that it has been oratorically erected to refute everything from busing to abortion...

...But even as he glorified the wall, Waite was busy breaking it down-ignoring the Mormon church’s claim to be following the higher laws of God and stripping Reynolds of his wives...

...Jefferson’s wall metaphor made virtually no impression on the legal eagles of his time...

...The notion of complete church-state separation is a swell ideal, but not one that has any legal grounding in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or any other of the usual sources of American law...

...But as politicians reverentially stand beside it, the courts have long been walking through it...

...We could not approve the slightest breach...

...Still, Everson v. Board ofEducation, a 1947 busing case, brought the wall into 20th century constitutional law...

...Reynolds v. United States, an 1878 suit against a Mormon who wanted exponential conjugal bliss, marked the first time that the Supreme Court dusted off Jefferson’s letter and made mention of the “wall...

...Which is why, for more than 100 years, Jefferson’s little note about the wall has been, not a cornerstone, but a stray pebble on the rocky shoals of church and state...

...Without this wall to block their vision, courts can discriminate among individual cases without deferring to misleading philosophical absolutes...

...In fact, the phrase first appeared in a note scribbled by Thomas Jefferson to a bunch of Connecticut Baptists...

...in fact, it seemed not to strike public fancy for the next 75 years, until a bigamy case brought it back to life...

...Proclaimed Justice Hugo Black: “The First Amendment has erected a wall between Church and State...

...The interests of both always will and should intersect in a multitude of ways...

...The very permeable Everson case set the precedent upon which a whole slew of government and religion cases have been decided...

...On January 1, 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Baptist association of Danbury to explain why he would not declare a national day of fasting, as Presidents Washington and Adams had occasionally done in the past...

...That wall must be kept high and impregnable...

...Elliott Beard...

...We have very little idea of how high he thinks the wall of separation between church and state ought to be...

...Put to complicated, real-life tests, it seemed, the wall left a little to be desired...

...Strong words-but due to the particulars of the case, irrelevant ones...

...Citing Souter’s published criticism of the Lemon decision, Biden charged that Souter had not indicated “what guarantees of religious freedom he would impose in its place...

...As Justice Robert H. Jackson noted in his dissent, “[Tlhe undertones of the opinion, advocating complete and uncompromising separation between Church and State, seem utterly discordant with its conclusion yielding support to their commingling in educational matters...

...Biden’s assumption-that religious freedom can be effected only by utter disconnectedness of our political system from any ecclesiastical ones-has always been wrong...

...While 1970’s Wulz v. Tux Commission of New Ynr-k, rejecting an adamant atheist’s objection to property tax exemptions for churches, found Chief Justice Warren Burger longing nostalgically for the wall-referring to “the desired insulation and separation” between church and state-he knew he had to give some ground to reality...

...A year later, he noted in Lemon v. Kurtzman, a suit over partial state funding of Pennsylvania’s parochial schools, that the “line of separation, far from being a ‘wall,’ is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier...

...In the 1990 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee David Souter, Senator Joe Biden had no time for the intricacies of the God/government confabulation...

...The decision allowed New Jersey to continue using state funds to bus kids to religious schools...

...Coming as this does from an acknowledged leader . . . it may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect the [First] Amendment thus secured,” Chief Justice Morrison Waite stated in the court’s opinion...

...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law regarding an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State,” Jefferson wrote...

...But politicians are still very much in thrall to the wall...