The net effect of the distortion of the First Amendment is to require that wherever the state is, religion must be excluded.

The First Amendment is now being used by the secularists of our day as a cattle prod to herd conservative religious people out of the public life of the nation and into, as others have put it, a religious ghetto.

God has virtually been made an illegal subject in that state institution most devoted to the shaping of the minds and values of our people - the public schools.

Religious people are now finding that the First Amendment is being used to herd them into a social ghetto, separated and walled off from public participation.

That such a perspective of the Declaration's 'Creator God' should sound so foreign and controversial to people today is a tragic and striking sign of how far we are removed from the thinking of our colonial fathers.

The net effect of the distortion of the First Amendment is to require that wherever the state is, religion must be excluded.

Religious people, in the name of the Constitution, are increasingly being shoved to the back of the social bus.