To the editor:

Steve Lopes, from the Douglas County ACLU, gave the readers of the Journal-World an almost textbook example of pusillanimous logic and the extrapolation of misstatements therefrom.

Mr. Lopes quotes, in isolation and without context, Justice Hugo Black’s misapplication of former President Jefferson’s infamous quote concerning separation of church and state in a generally faulty Supreme Court decision entitled Everson v. Board of Education.

Justice Black, like most leftist appointees (he was appointed by the notorious Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937) seized upon an opportunity to include (and thus set precedence) a completely irrelevant comment in the Everson case, which concerned only whether or not local authorities could provide buses to Catholic schoolchildren.

In fact, President Jefferson’s comment comes from a letter he wrote to Danbury Baptist Assn. of Connecticut in which he sought to allay their fears of the establishment of a particular denomination’s dominance of state religious activity and is a summation of Roger William’s (a prominent Baptist preacher) thoughts on the subject. He was rooting his assurances in their own common language: The idea that a given religion would be protected against the influence of the state and not fall under the influence of a state religion (these people were refugees from the oppressive Church of England).

Both Justice Black and Mr. Lopes are in serious but deliberate error. Mr. Lopes realizes, much like Justice Black, that their great opponent is the very document they so despise, the U.S. Constitution where the aforementioned phrase remains conspicuously absent.

Matthew O’Connell,

Topeka