Don Lemon Gets the First Amendment Wrong

Don Lemon was arrested last week and charged with conspiracy against religious freedom. On January 18, an anti-ICE mob disrupted the Sunday service at a Minnesota church because the pastor, David Easterwood, also heads the local ICE field office. Lemon followed directly on the tails of the horde and pushed a microphone into the minister’s face. When the minister expressed rightful indignation at the breach, Lemon lectured him about the “Constitution” and the “First Amendment.”  

But what are the rights of the First Amendment? And where does the left’s sense of moralistic entitlement come from? The amendment protects five rights: freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly, and petition. Liberals, however, have tended to treat the First Amendment as a grab bag of uncoordinated, potentially conflicting rights. That relativist leveling of rights usually leads people to push their own preferences. 

The most egregious example of that vision of uncoordinated rights is how the left has generally pitted the amendment’s non-establishment clause and free exercise clause against each other. As a result, the governing principle of religious freedom jurisprudence has, in practice, become: “Who can cobble together five Supreme Court justices to make a majority?”