Lemon’s Latest Victim: Felix Shows Why

Lemon’s Latest Victim: Felix Shows Why Lemon Must Go

Jurist

December 2, 2016

The late Justice Antonin Scalia once described the infamous Lemon v. Kurtzman test for analyzing Establishment Clause matters as a “ghoul” from a “late-night horror movie” that simply will not die. Felix v. City of Bloomfield, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit’s most recent application of the Establishment Clause, shows that the monster is alive and well.

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Several institutions including American Hindu Coalition, Manhattan Institute, Advancing American Freedom, and Capability Consulting, a business group dedicated to disability education, have filed “friend-of-the-court” briefs in Warner v. Hillsborough County School Board, urging the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse a lower court decision that prohibits parents from representing their children pro se unless they are an attorney.

When our Nation’s Founding Fathers wrote the Establishment Clause into the Bill of Rights, they envisioned it as a protective device – a means of safeguarding citizens from a federally-mandated religion. In just over two hundred years, it has instead become a weapon often wielded by government bureaucrats to stamp out any vestige of religion from our public life. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito even warned that religious liberty is “fast becoming a disfavored right.”