Word: aid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Supreme Court attempted to address these questions in its landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. The court's solution rested on the concept of viability, defined as the time the fetus is "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb albeit with artificial aid." Until that point, said the majority, a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy was guaranteed by the privacy rights implicit in the 14th Amendment, which has been interpreted to include personal rights relating to marriage, procreation and contraception. But once viability occurs, the court ruled, a state may limit or proscribe abortion...
...Supreme Court has drawn some confusing borders between church and state, basing its decisions on a fervently disputed phrase in the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." As interpreted by the high court, those words forbid incidental aid to parochial schools and religious agencies, posting the Ten Commandments in public classrooms or, in a decision two weeks ago, laws that require teaching "creation science" alongside evolution. Citing the establishment clause, the pro-choice Abortion Rights Mobilization hopes the courts will force the Roman Catholic Church to stop pro-life politicking or lose its tax exemption...
...Supreme Court's policy of near strict separation was laid out in a 1947 case, the first to apply the establishment clause to the states. The court declared neither federal nor local governments "can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another." In addition, no tax money should support "any religious activities or institutions." In 1971 the court developed a new threefold test: laws must avoid "excessive government entanglement with religion," have a "principal" effect "that neither advances nor inhibits religion," and have a "secular" purpose. Last week the high court decided that...
Most of the considerable emotion that surrounds the establishment clause concerns education -- aid to schools with religious sponsorship and the treatment of religion in public schools. In 1985 the Supreme Court threw out a law authorizing a "moment of silence" in Alabama's public classrooms because the state law specified that the purpose was to set aside time to pray. The court hinted broadly that it might accept a nearly identical law if the measure did not narrow the purpose so plainly. Such a law is currently under challenge in New Jersey...
...well: a grounding in the ideas of its time, economy of language, orderliness, symmetrical design, a strong, arresting lead sentence. Then, there's all that shapely ambiguity. Even those who have never read the document, enduring wars, debts, threats to health, privacy, equality, down to questions raised by AIDS and aid to the contras, are convinced that the / Constitution's words foresaw all that...