Letter to the Editor

Stop the squeezing

A lawsuit has been filed in Ohio to get 'In God We Trust' removed from our currency. 41 people are being represented. One plaintiff says his Atheism is "substantially burdened because he is forced to bear on his person a religious statement that causes him to sense his government is legitimizing, promoting and reinforcing negative and injurious attitudes not only against Atheists in general but against him personally."

Wow! I wonder how long it took the attorney to craft that statement.

This is what the Constitution says about religion, from which all our rulings to remove God from our midst have been squeezed: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Thomas Jefferson said, "On every question of construction, [let us] carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which was intended."

The squeezing needs to stop. Many of the past squeezes need to be reversed.

Mike Jones, Cape Girardeau