A Political History of the Establishment Clause

Now pending before the Supreme Court is the most important church-state issue of our time: whether publicly funded vouchers may be used at private, religious schools without violating the Establishment Clause. The last time the Court considered school aid, it overruled precedent and upheld a government program providing computers and other instructional materials to parochial schools. In a plurality opinion defending that result, Justice Thomas dismissed as irrelevant the fact that some aid recipients were pervasively sectarian. That label, said Thomas, had a shameful pedigree. He traced it to the Blaine Amendment, proposed in 1875, which would have altered the Constitution to ban aid to sectarian institutions. At the time, it was an open secret that \u27sectarian\u27 was code for \u27Catholic.\u27 Of course, said Thomas, the word could describe schools of other religions, but the Court eliminated this possibility of confusion by coining the phrase pervasively sectarian - a term applicable almost exelusively to Catholic parochial schools. The exclusion of pervasively sectarian schools from otherwise permissible aid to education was, Thomas concluded, not a neutral interpretation of constitutional command but a doctrine born of bigotry. Justice Thomas did not attack the ban against aid to pervasively sectarian schools merely as a misunderstanding of text or original intent. He charged, rather, that the hostility to pervasively sectarian institutions reflected political conflict and popular prejudice. This is not the usual stuff of Supreme Court debate. Perhaps for that reason, Justice Souter\u27s dissent did not so much answer the accusation as make fun of it, noting only that some pervasively sectarian schools are not Catholic and that some Catholics oppose school aid. Nevertheless, Thomas\u27s account is at least partly true. The constitutional disfavor of pervasively sectarian institutions is indeed a doctrine born, if not of bigotry, at least of a highly partisan understanding of laws respecting an establishment of religion. The first and narrowest ambition of this Article is to document that assertion

Computer solutions of the vlasov equations final report, jun. 1, 1963 - nov. 30, 1964

Computer programs for solutions of Vlasov equations for plane, cylindrical, and spherical geometr

On the stability of gas bubbles in sea water

Laboratory experiments have been performed to determine the rate of solution and the change in composition of air bubbles in stirred sea water as a function of depth (0-200 m) and temperature (1-27° C). At each depth the shrinking of the diameter is nearly linear. This rate of solution increases with increasing pressure up to a limiting value which is almost reached at a depth of 20 m. The rate of disappearance of a bubble is only imperceptibly influenced by temperature. When a bubble of air dissolves at a given depth it becomes richer in nitrogen until a final constant composition is reached. This final nitrogen percentage increases with increasing depth. Equations have been developed, based on the theory of diffusion, which satisfactorily account for the observed facts

Increases in the abundance of microbial genes encoding halotolerance and photosynthesis along a sediment salinity gradient

Biogeochemical cycles are driven by the metabolic activity of microbial communities, yet the environmental parameters that underpin shifts in the functional potential coded within microbial community genomes are still poorly understood. Salinity is one of the primary determinants of microbial community structure and can vary strongly along gradients within a variety of habitats. To test the hypothesis that shifts in salinity will also alter the bulk biogeochemical potential of aquatic microbial assemblages, we generated four metagenomic DNA sequence libraries from sediment samples taken along a continuous, natural salinity gradient in the Coorong lagoon, Australia, and compared them to physical and chemical parameters. A total of 392483 DNA sequences obtained from four sediment samples were generated and used to compare genomic characteristics along the gradient. The most significant shifts along the salinity gradient were in the genetic potential for halotolerance and photosynthesis, which were more highly represented in hypersaline samples. At these sites, halotolerance was achieved by an increase in genes responsible for the acquisition of compatible solutes-organic chemicals which influence the carbon, nitrogen and methane cycles of sediment. Photosynthesis gene increases were coupled to an increase in genes matching Cyanobacteria, which are responsible for mediating CO2 and nitrogen cycles. These salinity driven shifts in gene abundance will influence nutrient cycles along the gradient, controlling the ecology and biogeochemistry of the entire ecosystem. © 2012 Author(s)

Corrigendum: Regional and Microenvironmental Scale Characterization of the Zostera muelleri Seagrass Microbiome

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2019.01011.]