the reading in the public schools of the King James version of the Bible, the recitation of the Lord's prayer, and the singing of hymns. The children were not required to participate, most Biblical passages were taken from the Old Testament, and when a rabbi complained about certain of the songs being prepared for a Christmas pageant, the superintendent of schools, according to his testimony, ‘had it stopped.'" Their were no violations of the Texas state constitution in these activities, as well as no reference to the federal Constitution in the Texas Supreme Court findings.As of 1940, more then 150 years after the Constitution came into effect, more then seventy years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the religion clauses of the First Amendment had never been extended to the states. In 1947, Arch R. Everson argued to the Supreme Court to extend the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the states. The case was concerning the state governments paying for transportation parochial school children the schools. Justice Hugo Black seized this opportunity and stated that "The ‘establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another." This was just one step in extending the entire Bill of Rights to the states.The courts have created a number of tests which can be used to determine the constitutionality of proposed laws or to settle cases. In 1971 the federal courts created a test, first utilized in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, to maintain the separation of Church and State. The Lemon test consists of three questions which a court must ask in order to pass a statute. The questions being: (1) whether the government's action has a secular or a religious purpose; (2) whether the primary effect of the government's a...
