Justice White warned in 1981 that speech framing empties the Religion Clauses

Evidence

Supreme Court justice Byron White spotted the incoherent nature of this argument in a 1981 case Widmar v. Vincent, in which the Court decided that excluding a religious group from meeting on state university campus facilities amounted to a violation of its free speech rights. The opinion of the majority, White argued in his dissent, “is founded on the proposition that because religious worship uses speech, it is protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.” White concluded, “I believe this proposition is plainly wrong … Were it right, the Religion Clauses would be emptied of any independent meaning in circumstances in which religious practice took the form of speech.” — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 861

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘unintelligible as a feature not bug’ line about rendering the Establishment Clause toothless.