&gt; establishment of religion<p>If you&#x27;re going to quote the First Amendment, it&#x27;s worth knowing what it says. An &quot;establishment of religion&quot; is a state church, like the Church of England -- the example the framers had in mind, the cause of lots of settlement in the colonies, and an institution that the British monarch is still head of today. Half of the House of Lords are &quot;Lords Spiritual.&quot; The coronation ceremony involves an Anglican mass. And it&#x27;s more than just ritual: as late as 1936, Edward VIII abdicated the crown because he wanted to marry a divorcee, and it was inappropriate for the leader of the Church of England to go against its teachings.<p>Or take Finland, where the two state churches (the Evangelical Lutheran one and the Orthodox one) facilitate government records of population, in the equivalent of the census, and members of either church (you have to resign membership by a legal process) and also corporations pay a church tax. Or Denmark, whose constitution states, &quot;The Evangelical Lutheran Church shall be the Established Church of Denmark, and as such shall be supported by the State.&quot; Or any number of other European countries with church taxes or established churches -- not to mention other parts of the world, such as the Islamic republics.<p>The state authorizing religious ministers of scores of denominations to officiate marriages in addition to justices of the peace is not, in any sense, an &quot;establishment of religion.&quot;