The 14th Amendment & Religious Liberty | Mark Rienzi | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:00 certainly one point of evolution in the history of religious freedom in this country would be at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and then its subsequent the subjective doctrine of incorporation that was developed how did that affect the the nation’s understanding of religious freedom and and what what came from that change sure so before the Civil War and

0:20 before the 14th amendment it was widely understood that the rights you had in the bill of rights are rights against the national government the federal government in Washington DC and they’re not rights that you have against your state and local governments when Congress wrote and the United States adopted the 14th amendment one of the points of that amendment was to say they were chiefly concerned with freed slaves

0:41 in the south right the Republicans in Congress thought the southern states will be awful to the recently freed slaves unless we make federal protections the federal bill of rights applicable so that people you know can speak freely and own property can own a gun right those kinds of things they were pretty sure the southern states wouldn’t allow to the recently freed slaves so they wrote the Fourteenth

1:03 Amendment specifically to say that the rights and privileges that you have under the Bill of Rights as against the national government also apply against your state and local governments now it took the Supreme Court a few generations to to get that principle fully right and fully built out but the end result is that your rights under the First Amendment under the Bill of Rights

1:23 almost without exception also flying at state local governments