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" The most frightening phrase in the English language at the moment is, &amp;quot;majority Republican state legislature.&amp;quot; In case you&amp;#039;ve missed it while reading all the earnest thumb-sucking out of Washington as regards how much the national GOP needs to change in order to survive in this new political age, out in the states, the party&amp;#039;s politicians have unleashed a buffalo stampede of nonsense on the citizens of the various states. We usually wrap it all up in our weekly survey of what&amp;#039;s goin&amp;#039; down in the Laboratories Of Democracy, but some guys in North Carolina \u2014 aka, The Normal One \u2014 just completely flipped their lids. A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide. The legislation grew out of a dispute between the American Civil Liberties Union against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In a federal lawsuit filed last month, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers. Overtly Christian prayers at government meetings are not rare in North Carolina. Since the Republican takeover in 2011, the state Senate chaplain has offered an explicitly Christian invocation virtually every day of session, despite the fact that some senators are not Christian. Oh, swell. Not only the clearest violation of the First Amendment possible, but backed up by the theory of nullification which, to borrow a phrase from my pal, Roy Blount, Jr., was a bad idea at the time and looks even worse in retrospect. Thus does North Carolina march boldly into the past, looking neither right nor left as it passes 1789 or 1776, until it arrives at 1640, and Quakers and Catholics are hiding under the bed. &amp;quot;The Constitution of the United States does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional; therefore, by virtue of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the power to determine constitutionality and the proper interpretation and proper application of the Constitution is reserved to the states and to the people,&amp;quot; the bill states. &amp;quot;Each state in the union is sovereign and may independently determine how that state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion.&amp;quot;  Bear in mind. Every one of the new young guns in the U.S. Senate who have so impressed the national punditariat \u2014 Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee \u2014 believe exactly the same thing about the 10th Amendment. Tentherism is on its way to being as much of a litmus test for conservative bona fides as are supply-side economics and fealty to the snowflake Jesus babies, This is no longer a fringe theory beloved by Confederate nostalgics. It is a living, breathing element in our national politics and is growing stronger by the day. In rebuttal, I defer the balance of my time to the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Madison, who wrote the following in his Memorial And Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, the least-appreciated, but one of the most important, of our founding documents. Because experience witnesseth that eccelsiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. Enquire of the Teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those of every sect, point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy. Propose a restoration of this primitive State in which its Teachers depended on the voluntary rewards of their flocks, many of them predict its downfall. On which Side ought their testimony to have greatest weight, when for or when against their interest?  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18041/north-carolina-bill-state-religion-040313/>