Word: cr
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...referendum grew out of a scandal seven years ago involving foreign deposits. An officer at a Crédit Suisse branch in Chiasso, near the Italian border, was convicted of illegally diverting more than $800 million in customer funds into speculative investments. Most of the money had come from Italians seeking a haven from inflation and high tax rates...
...case involved Pawtucket's use of public funds ($1,365 initially, $20 a year now) to buy and then reerect annually a crèche as part of a Christmas display that also featured such secular holiday symbols as reindeer and a Santa Claus house. Chief Justice Burger, writing for the court majority, found the Nativity scene to be a "passive" symbol and its presence in the display "no more an advancement or endorsement of religion than...the exhibition of literally hundreds of religious paintings in governmentally supported museums." Said Burger: "We are unable to perceive the Archbishop...
...some legal scholars, last week's decision on the Pawtucket crèche was a new departure by the court in interpreting the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."). Writing for the 5-4 majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger seemed to argue that the traditional guidelines-that a law must serve a secular purpose, neither advance nor inhibit religion, and not entangle the state in purely religious questions-were merely "useful," rather than mandatory. "A more flexible standard may be emerging," says U.S. Solicitor General...
...issues are not the same size. Many who could not care less about the crèche in Pawtucket would go to the wall of separation on the school-prayer decision, but both issues derive from minority protests. Without malice or belligerence, a Christian could reasonably ask: Whose country is it anyway...
What, then, is the fuss about? Why on issues such as the Nativity display and school prayer cannot the majority simply say, "Take it or leave it"? On the crèche issue, that is what the court decided it could say, though not without a lot of irrelevant hand wringing about the "passive symbolism" of the Nativity display as opposed to the "active symbolism," say, of the cross. (The distinction is meaningless.) In the matter of school prayer, the court continues to hold its ground, but why? And why not have an amendment allowing everyone to pray...