WILMINGTON, Del. — Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.
The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O’Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons’ position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.
Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that “religious doctrine doesn’t belong in our public schools.”
“Local schools do not have the right to teach what they feel?” O’Donnell said. “Talk about imposing your beliefs on the local schools.”
When O’Donnell cited “indispensable principles” of the Founding Fathers in her criticism of an overreaching federal government, Coons interrupted her to say, “One of those indispensable principles is the separation of church and state.”
“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” O’Donnell asked, a statement that drew laughter from the audience. When Coons returned to the topic a few minutes later, he said her comment “reveals her fundamental misunderstanding of what our Constitution is.”
“The First Amendment establishes the separation, the fact that the federal government shall not establish religion,” Coons said.
“The First Amendment does?” O’Donnell interrupted. “You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?”
When Coons summarized the amendment as saying government shall make no law establishing religion, O’Donnell interrupted again: “That’s in the First Amendment?”
Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.
“You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp,” Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O’Donnell’s grasp of the Constitution.
The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The phrase “separation of church and state” is usually traced to President Thomas Jefferson. In a letter in 1802, he referred to the First Amendment and added that it built “a wall of separation between Church &State.” The relationship of government and religion continues to be debated in American law.
Erin Daly, a Widener professor who specializes in constitutional law, said that while there are questions about what counts as government promotion of religion, there is little debate over whether the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from making laws establishing religion.
“She seemed genuinely surprised that the principle of separation of church and state derives from the First Amendment, and I think to many of us in the law school that was a surprise,” Daly said. “It’s one thing to not know the 17th Amendment or some of the others, but most Americans do know the basics of the First Amendment.”
O’Donnell didn’t respond to reporters who asked her to clarify her views after the debate. Her campaign manager, Matt Moran, later issued a statement saying that O’Donnell wasn’t questioning the concept of separation of church and state.
“She simply made the point that the phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution,” Moran said.
The debate, their third in the past week, was more testy than earlier ones.
O’Donnell began by defending herself for not being able to name a recent Supreme Court decision with which she disagrees at a debate last week. She said she was stumped because she largely agrees with the court’s recent decisions under conservative chief justices John Roberts and William Rehnquist.
“I would say this court is on the right track,” she said.
The two candidates repeatedly talked over each other, with O’Donnell accusing Coons of caving at one point when he asked the moderator to move on to a new question after a lengthy argument.
“I guess he can’t handle it,” she said.
O’Donnell, a tea party favorite who stunned the state by winning the GOP primary last month in her third Senate bid in five years, called Coons a liberal “addicted to a culture of waste, fraud and abuse.”
Coons, who has held a double-digit lead in recent polls, urged voters to support him as the candidate of substance, with a track record over six years as executive of the state’s most populous county. He said O’Donnell’s only experience is in “sharpening the partisan divide but not at bridging it.”
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