60 years ago: U.S. Supreme Court sides with atheist in Maryland case

On June 19, 1961, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Torcaso v. Watkins, ruled 9-0 that states were prohibited from requiring a religious test to hold public office. The case involved Roy Torcaso, who had been appointed a notary public by Maryland Governor John Millard Tawes. The Constitution of Maryland required "a declaration of belief in the existence of God" in order for a person to hold "any office of profit or trust in this State." Mr. Torcaso was a professing atheist, refused to make such a declaration, and was denied the position.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Maryland requirement violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, and had the effect of imposing a religious test for holding office. I doubt that those who wrote those amendments had that in mind when the amendments were approved. This decision has been forgotten in the light of the subsequent U.S. Supreme Court rulings Engel v. Vitale (1962), which prohibited an official school prayer, and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), but it should be included with them as part of a series of rulings, starting with Everson v. Board of Education (1947), that increasingly ordered God out of public life.

I'm not going to talk about how five of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices in 1961--Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Associate Justices Hugo Black, Tom Clark, William O. Douglas, and Tom Clark--were known to be Freemasons. Roman Catholic journalist Paul A. Fisher, in his book Behind the Lodge Door (1988, 1989), noted that the Supreme Court's anti-religious decisions came during a three-decade period from the 1940s to the 1970s when the Court was dominated by Freemasons.