- Describe how you understand the “Establishment Clause” and the related “Lemon Test”. The way that I understand the establishment clause is that it is the idea that Congress is not allowed to create or promote a religion, in order to prevent the United States from having an official government supported religion. The reason this is done is because Americans come from many different backgrounds and support many different religions, so this allows every American to support whatever religion they deserve without feeling ostracized from supporting a religion that’s different from the one that the government supports. Since there‘s no government religion, everyone feels free to believe in whatever they want to believe in. On top of this, this also made sure that states couldn’t establish a religion as the religion of that state. For example, there couldn’t be an official religion for New York or an official religion of Texas. The lemon test were a set of criteria that was established in order to decide if a law or government action that has the potential to promote a particular religious practice should stand. If the criteria were met, then the law or action would be constitutional and would remain and vice versa if the criteria were not met. These criteria essentially stated that the action or law can’t limit or advance religious practice, it must have a reason to be done outside of religion and it shouldn’t cause the government to have excessive involvement with any form of religion. The lemon test was done in order to continue to ensure that everyone had the freedom to believe in whatever religion that they believed in without being forced or limited by laws or actions that would prevent them from doing so.
2. Is burning the US flag protected by the First Amendment? Explain by referring to the relevant court case discussed in the reading. I would say that the First Amendment does protect the burning of the U.S flag. The reason why I say this is because of the Texas v. Johnson case that occurred in the Supreme Court. In 1984, a man named Gregory Lee Johnson ended up setting fire to a U.S flag as part of a protest that occurred near the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas. This caused him to get arrested and charged with “desecration of a venerated object”. This led to the Texas v. Johnson case’s decision in 1989, in which the Supreme Court ruled that flag burning is protected by the First Amendment due to it being a form of symbolic speech. Despite Congress’s attempts on trying to make flag desecration a crime, they have not succeeded in doing such a thing and burning the U.S flag is still protected by the First Amendment as a form of symbolic speech.
3. What does it mean when someone says “I’m taking the Fifth”? When someone says that they are taking the fifth, what they mean is that they are taking the right to remain silent, which is essentially the right to not give evidence to any form of law enforcement (whether it be police officers or the court) that would incriminate oneself. For example, if an officer asks a car driver to got into a car crash to tell them what happened, the car driver, who got into the accident due to texting on their phone and keeping their eyes of the road, choses to take the fifth and doesn’t tell the officer anything since they don’t want to incriminate themselves to the police officer.
