Venerate, Amend . . . and Violate
Oren Gross. Many regard the Constitution as part of the holy trinity of American secular religion. A venerated document, it is often referred to in religious terms. A “kind of Ark of the Covenant of the New Israel that is America,” this “most wonderful instrument ever drawn by the hand of man,” was “divinely inspired,” and ought to be safeguarded with a “holy zeal.” A President and a Chief Justice exhorted the teaching of the principles of the Constitution in terms that in the Jewish prayer book referred to divine commandments: “[T]each them to your children, speak of them when sitting in your home, speak of them when walking by the way, when lying down and when rising up, write them upon the doorplate of your home and upon your gates.” The Constitution is the most recent chapter in a…