Not being a prophet, I don't predict US election winners. But, as a historian, I can say who already lost this one. Whether Barack Obama or John McCain
takes it, pundits endorsing Obama, however critically, will discover that they damaged their reputations.

Serious observers, for or against, left to right, now see 'Mr. Change' as 'Mr. Changeling,' willing to betray principles of importance to them. NY Times
wordsmith William Safire well coined "The Audacity of Hype" out of the title of his hopeless book, and a 7/4 Times editorial, "New and Not Improved,"
bombarded the candidate it desperately wants to win: Obama stirred his legions of supporters and raised our hopes, promising to change the old order of things.... Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings. First he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election.... Obama has abandoned his vow to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it includes an immunity clause for telecommunications companies that amounts to a sanctioned cover-up of Mr. Bush's unlawful eavesdropping after 9/11....

Obama of the primary season used to brag that he would stand before interest groups and tell them tough truths. The new Mr. Obama tells evangelical
Christians that he wants to expand President Bush's policy of funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations -- a policy that violates
the separation of church and state and turns a government function into a charitable donation.

He says he would not allow those groups to discriminate in employment, as Mr. Bush did, which is nice. But the Constitution exists to protect democracy, no
matter who is president and how good his intentions may be."

Times editorialists believe in church-state separation. But they also believe they have duties to the empire they serve as throne advisors. The next editorial insisted that
"Given the huge sums that the United States has spent backing the Colombians' fight against the FARC, President Bush and Senators John McCain and Barack
Obama should now join in congratulating Mr. Uribe - and in urging him to press for a full political victory."

By now everyone knows that Jesse Jackson's hobby is orchiectomy, and attribute his proposal to surgically remove Obama's "nuts" to rage at his getting the
nomination that the Rev thought his due. But he's not the only Black troubled by Obama. Almost half of the 42 House of Representatives Blacks backed Clinton, expecting her gratitude after winning the nomination. They've done little for poor Blacks since the civil rights struggle that some took part in. Now they are surpassed by someone whose done no more, but whose victory would destroy their affirmative action argument.

Obama says its "a useful, if limited, tool to expand opportunity to underrepresented minorities." He calls for "America to make investments needed to ensure that all children perform at grade level and graduate from high school." But everyone reads that as vote-chasing rabble-babble coming from the guy who spoke with McCain on 9/11, at Columbia University, Obama's alma mater. They both support the return of the Reserve Officer Training Corps to Columbia, it having been kicked off campus in 1969 by anti-Vietnam war protesters. "McBama" was the apt buzz word of the Columbia Daily Spectator's coverage, complete with denunciations of Obama's previous right turns.

The Senate just voted 88 to 8 for $612.5 billion in military programs. Campaigners Obama, Biden and McCain didn't vote, but Obama is definitely for big bucks military equipment updates for chasing Islamic fundamentalists. How much money could he have left over to spend on poor Americans?

Given such declarations, the spectrum of concerned Blacks goes beyond adulterous Revs and party hacks. Paul Robeson, Jr. is quoted in the 7/10 NY Amsterdam
News. His father was a Black liberation icon and Jr. was immensely involved in the struggle:

"The apparent traditional move to the center by Obama is not only a mistake, it reverses -- in many people's mind, especially his base and Black Americans - his commitment to be a candidate of change. It was he who said that 'it's about you and not about me.' He can't take us for granted."

Obama denounces fathers who abandon gal-pals and kids to ghetto poverty, crime, etc. Except that his African father abandoned ship when he was two, yet he's done OK. Couples breaking up after the gal's child is common today among young Americans of all races and educations. Most ex-boy-toys help pay for their kid's upkeep. But even where dad is a deadbeat, if mom has her act together, her kid gets educated.

Dumping on poor bad-dads pleases many Christian ears, black, white, Hispanic. But cure for poor-single-mom-and-kid syndrome lies in paying all uneducated moms to go back to school until they learn enough to earn enough. "Monkey see, monkey do," so the proverb. When single monkey mom sees that putting her nose before books and computers pays off, she usually makes sure her little monkey 'gets a better start in life than I did.'

OBAMA, BLACK KING & WHITE KENNEDY ALL ROLLED INTO ONE?

No one was surprised when media used Obama's Denver rap on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a dream" speech to tell us that it was a giant step in the long march towards complete racial equality. But what would Obama's victory mean for poor Blacks?

Readers familiar with America's civil rights movement will agree that History with a capital H walked thru my door in 1985 when Stokely Carmichael came to discuss my book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. Stokely, then calling himself Kwame Ture, worked with me in a Coalition Against Zionism and Racism until his 1998 death. Of course we discussed the civil rights movement, agreeing on one central point.

Leftists provided the movement's crucial ideologies and energy. The 1963 rally's organizer was Bayard Rustin of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation. King relied on ex-Communist Stanley Levison for research for many speeches. King denounced Democrat Lyndon Johnson's war against Stalinist Ho Chi Minh. W. E. B. DuBois ultimately joined the Communist Party. Paul Robeson was emphatically pro-Soviet. Historian C. L. R. James passed thru Trotskyism. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party's youth group was organizing a tour for Malcolm X when he was assassinated. Huey Newton's Black Panthers declared themselves part of the world revolution. And in our last discussion Kwame reaffirmed that "you can't be a Black nationalist if you aren't a socialist." But we also understood that the lefts didn't have the clarity, unity or numbers to achieve their generic goal.

The destruction of Jim Crow 'legal segregation' was an enormous victory for the masses but an even bigger victory for educated Blacks. They play a growing role in administering giant corporations. Many cities have Black mayors. New York State's Governor is Black. Colin Powell and Condy Rice made the State Department into a Black preserve. But it was imperialism that was integrated. If Obama wins it will still be imperialism, not America, that is integrated. Millions of Blacks will still be de facto segregated in poor ghettoes, go to prison or join the military and die for the rich. Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report brought this up to date in Louis Farrakhan's 9/2 Final Call:

"Ruling circles in the US ... are behind Sen. Obama more so than ... the White electorate, he maintained. This has been with their financial support and contributions. 'They are the ones who want a new face on the old order ....

[T]his support of Sen. Obama represents the new and improved product of corporate marketing.'"

The 9/16 Times confirmed that, "On Wall Street's Republican-friendly turf, Mr. Obama has out-raised Mr. McCain."

Indeed Obama fans, from Wall Street to union hiring halls, also hail Obama's ability to 'market' himself. Then let him or them explain his using the King speech anniversary to remind us that the Democrats are "the party of Roosevelt! We are the party of Kennedy! Don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country."

Roosevelt was an anti-Asian racist. He wrote a 4/30/25 guest column for Macon, Georgia's Daily Telegraph. It tells us what was in his head in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, when he put all west coast Japanese-American citizens, toddlers to grannies, into concentration camps.

"Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results. Eurasians - men and women and children party of Asiatic blood and partly of European blood.... In this question, then, of Japanese exclusion from the United States, it is necessary only to advance the true reason -- the undesirability of mixing the blood of the two peoples."

And what did it mean when Obama hailed Kennedy, a cold war President who wiretapped King's phone, looking for Communists?

Put on your thinking cap. A modern demagogue, he reads polls showing most voters to be historic ignoramuses. Their Roosevelt fought Tojo and Hitler, period, end of story. For them, assassinated Kennedy was another Lincoln. No mincing words, if they are dumb enough to still admire them, he is cunning enough praise them. But in fact isn't he truly like his heroes, determined to preserve the "military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower warned against?

THE RIGHT IS ALSO ONTO OBAMA'S ACT

Although everyone recognizes a snake in a zoo, we rarely agree re political reptiles. Yet we all see Obama slithering along the ground. On 6/4, the Democrat went before the America Israel Public Affairs Committee to declare that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

When the world denounced this as more pro-Israel than Washington's standard 'Jerusalem's status is to be negotiated,' his tune changed: "Obviously, it is going to be up the parties to negotiate a range of these issues." He told CNN that "this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech."

Zionist Rick Richman exposed this in the 7/16 NY Sun:

"His position on an 'undivided' Jerusalem did not result from 'poor phrasing'.... [T]he unambiguous commitment ... came at the end of a paragraph beginning 'Let me be clear'.... [I]t was not the first time he said it.... [H]e addressed the issue in 2000.... 'Jerusalem should remain united and should be recognized as Israel's capital.'"

Indeed he made an even more hard right statement re Jerusalem in January 2008, responding to an American Jewish Committee questionnaire: "Jerusalem will remain Israel's capital, and no one should want or expect it to be re-divided."

Nobody believes his AIPAC statement was, alas, "poor phrasing." We all fall in behind the 7/15 Christian Century, a prestigious liberal Protestant organ: "It was blatant pandering."

NY's 7/25 Jewish Week quoted John Hopkins Prof Benjamin Ginsburg:

"'The Obama campaign has pretty much tapped out individual contributors and the number of people giving small amounts on-line is diminishing,' he said. 'So it's back to the Democratic Party's traditional finance sources, which for the most part means big Jewish donors.' The campaign's heavy Jewish outreach is meant to 'reassure major contributors, to cut the resistance he's been encountering.'"

OBAMA'S DEMOCRATS AND GOD'S ONLY KID

Obama's party was founded by Thomas Jefferson, who coined "building a wall of separation between church and state," and James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights. But modern Democratic policies towards religion have significantly deviated from their secularism, disastrously effecting US and world politics. Therefore it is obligatory that attention focuses on Obama's positions re theology and morality.

Chasing Zionist money has been a party campaign fixture since 1948, when Harry Truman overruled his State Department, concerned with offending oil-rich Muslim Arab princelings, and recognized Israel. He also kicked off a crucial cold war strategy, mobilizing religious forces against 'godless Communism.' US taxes funded Christian Democratic Party regimes in Germany and Italy. Hitler's generals recreated his army for 'the free world.' Italy's CDs became one of history's most indisputably corrupt parties.

During the 1960 campaign, Jack Kennedy had to go before white Texas Protestants to promise that he wouldn't let the Catholic church dictate his policies. He proclaimed a belief in church/state separation. Then Kennedy, not his church, wiretapped King, the most infamous violation of Jefferson's wall in US history. His sub, Lyndon Johnson, enjoyed listening to King's sex life on FBI tapes made in hotel rooms as the minister traveled.

In 1979, Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter started covert arming of Islamic terrorists against a pro-Soviet, pro-equal rights for women regime in Afghanistan. But by 1992, Pennsylvania's anti-abortion Governor Bob Casey wasn't permitted a convention speech. And while Bill Clinton enjoyed White House fellatio with Monica Lewinski, he kept 10,000 US troops in Saudi Arabia. Off-base military gals couldn't drive cars and had to wear Saudi-style head-to-foot robes, in violation of the 1st Amendment promise of freedom of religion. Then, in 1993, he signed onto 'Don't ask, don't tell,' after pledging to lift the military's gay ban. And, according to the 7/5 Times, it was "Al Gore who in 1999 first proposed a full-scale religion-based initiative" re "government financed programs."

What was the party rank and file thinking while this was going on? A 2/22/03 poll told us that 67% of Democrats believed in a Devil. The Gallup organization is noted for piety, but this was too much. They closed the survey with a "Bottom Line."

"Over the centuries, science has been able to explain many phenomena that once seemed supernatural. Bad weather, ill health, and heretical opinions may not be the work of the infernal after all. With the advent of evolutionary theory and modern psychology, these days we're more likely to think of people who do terrible things as broken human beings, rather than agents of the netherworld. Furthermore, religion has ceded its civil authority. So we might expect belief in the devil to have largely evaporated. It hasn't. Regardless of political belief, religious inclination, education or region, most Americans believe that the devil exists."

The 2004 election had some Catholic bishops telling their faithful remnant not to vote for pro-legal abortion Catholic John Kerry. But the high point of that holy season was primary candidate Howard Dean's answering "Job" to ''what's your favorite New Testament book?'' Then, post-election, New Jersey Catholic gay Governor Jim McGreevey resigned in a sex and corruption scandal, after years of publicly opposing gay marriage.

Post 2004 debacle, the party threw on every priestly robe it could find. In 2005, Nancy Pelosi organized a congressional Faith Working Group. The party rewarded Dean with its national chair, and the greatest prophet since Job appointed Pentecostal Reverend Leah Daughtry as 2008 convention chief exec. The 7/20 NY Times said "Hers is a religion not only of divine healing but of talking in tongues." It bankrolled her Faith in Action team, three evangelicals, one Catholic, Jew and Muslim, and indeed the holy ghost worked in party HQ in Washington, roping in clergy.

This year also gave us Jewish NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's resignation in a prostitution scandal, after he campaigned against Wall Street using whores as treats for deserving customers. He was succeeded by NY's 1st Black Governor. David Paterson headed off another scandal by volunteering his own history of sexual romping and snorting coke. But alas, sins chase Democrats even when they don't commit them. His Catholic priest give the inauguration invocation, then got suspended, accused of pedophilia. And of course Protestant John Edwards gave us another lesson in Democratic morality.

This is the party, crooked as a dog's hind leg, full of demagogues and hypocrites, that Illinois Senator Obama rose within. Foreign readers should know that the entertainment highlight of American sociologists' gatherings is always fist-fights over whether New Jersey or Illinois has the most corrupt Democratic 'machine.' No scholar disputes that ethno-religious pandering is axiomatic Chicago Democratic sewer politics.

Obama has written at length re his identity problem. His white American mother and African father broke up when he was two and mom raised him. But Chicago was socially racist and he had to start his political career there as a reformist Black community organizer, working with churches. He discovered another identity problem. The Audacity of Hope tells us that mom was strictly secular. When dad contacted him he met an atheist. But "experiences in Chicago also forced me to confront a dilemma ... I had no community or shared traditions in which to ground my most deeply held beliefs. The Christians with whom I worked recognized themselves in me; they saw that I
knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an observer among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free .... I, too, might have contented myself had it not been for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.

For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change .... In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day ... I could see the Word made manifest."

Better yet, "the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts .... It was because of these newfound understandings ... that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."

And why did he find "His truth" in Trinity? Critics called it "a buppie church" and he admits that "there was no denying that the church had a disproportionate number of black professionals in its ranks: engineers, doctors, accountants, and corporate managers." But Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. showed him that most of the congregation were government workers. So he joined a 'Black' church in a majority white denomination.

In Dreams from My Father, he told of his hesitation to join any church. "I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion." But "expedient" was exactly what his "conversion" was. His writings on this are just a slick lawyer's brief, explaining why a skeptic anthropologist's son converted to an obscure denomination of the religion of a majority of voters that her politician son would encounter.

We see this in his relationship to Wright. He denounced Israel when it was apartheid South Africa's ally, and proclaimed AIDS to be a government plot against Blacks. What kind of half-African professor does nothing against that alliance when his pastor points it out, and what kind of law school lecturer is silent when his minister misleads his congregation with crackpot accusations that Washington is responsible for an epidemic that is only an expense for it? Many supporters are distraught because of Obama's recent changes. But his "conversion" reveals is that he has been Mr. Changeling for decades.

As his political ambitions developed, Obama realized that self-proclaimed Christianity could get him support from whites. A constitutional lecturer, he found a founding father era Rev to show secularists that white clergy could also be heroes. Audacity has a surreal reference to Jefferson and Madison:

"Jefferson and Madison in particular argued for what Jefferson called a 'wall of separation' between church and state.... But while it was Jefferson and Madison who pushed the Virginia statute of religious freedom that would become the model for the First Amendment's religion clauses, it wasn't these students of the Enlightenment who proved who proved to be the most effective champions of a separation between church and state. Rather, it was Baptists like Reverend John Leland and other evangelicals who provided the popular support needed to get these provisions ratified."

Madison earned the title 'father of the constitution' by pushing it through the constitutional convention. Article Vl declared that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." But this wasn't enough for some friends of the proposed constitution, including Leland and Jefferson. They wanted an emphatic amendment. Madison wasn't enthusiastic. On 10/17/1788 he explained why to Jefferson.

"My own opinion has always been in favor of a bill of rights.... At the same time I have never thought the omission a material defect, nor been anxious to supply it even by subsequent amendment, for any other reason than that it is anxiously desired by others.... because experience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions when its control is most needed. Repeated violations of these parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every state."

For Madison, the real barrier to a religious establishment was the fact that no sect was strong enough to dominate the federal union. But with Jefferson, Leland and others troubled by the absence of a Bill, he announced that he would present it as a member of the 1st House of Representatives. Satisfied, Leland campaigned for the constitution. But carefully self-constructed Christian Obama convinced himself of Leland's hyper-importance to justify abandonment of mom's "Enlightenment" philosophy out of vote-hustling considerations.

Note well that Madison was correct re a Bill of Rights being a parchment barrier. It was added to the Constitution in 1791 but by 1798 President John Adams's Federalists got the Sedition Act thru Congress. Ten editors were arrested for "publishing false or malicious statements against the President, Congress, or the government." Fortunately Jefferson won the next election, and kicked Federalism and its act into oblivion. Unfortunately since their day Democrats have frequently torn up the Bill, as with King's FBI file:

www.foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/king.htm

A CABINET SECRETARY FOR FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATIONS?

Why did the Times denounce Obama's call to expand funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations? After all, he distinguished
his plan from Bush's operation. Bush allows religion-based outfits getting tax money to consider an applicant's religion in deciding who they hire. According to Obama, in the 7/2 Times, in his administration,

"If you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them -- or against the people you hire -- on the basis of their religion."

Except that the 7/2 Sun had him "asked about hiring gays in such programs, Mr. Obama noted there is no federal law against sexual-orientation discrimination, but he said religious groups would have to abide by state laws that bar the practice."

Translated into English, didn't he plead guilty to the charge that his program would allow anti-gay hiring policies in states without bans on gay job-discrimination?

Worse yet, according to the Times, he "would consider elevating the director of his Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to a cabinet-level post."

Folks thinking of voting for him as a lesser evil must consider Article Six: "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." But can anyone see Obama appointing an atheist or Muslim Secretary of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships?

He's not chasing after white religious votes. Hell no! He's for government partnering with religious organizations because "the challenges we face today -- from saving our planet to ending poverty -- are simply too big for government to solve alone." Except that in 1811, President Madison vetoed a bill incorporating an Episcopal Church in the District of Columbia for, among other reasons:

"Because the bill vests in the said incorporated church an authority to provide for the support of the poor and the education of poor children of the same, an authority which, being altogether superfluous if the provision is to be the result of pious charity, would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty."

Unfortunately for Obama, his pious demagoguery generates a loud NO! from disparate elements. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State immediately declared himself "disappointed that any presidential candidate would want to continue a failed policy of the Bush administration. It ought to be shut down, not continued."

Obama is to the right of the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman on this. The 7/4 Jewish Week reported his "grave reservations" re the project.

"The whole idea of funneling federal money to religious institutions is 'bad policy,' Foxman said. 'While the caveats from Sen. Obama sound good, it will take a great deal of monitoring to make sure this does not lead to violations,' such as proselytizing and discrimination in hiring.... 'What he announced was a philosophy and a general commitment -- details to follow.'"

The weekly Forward descends from Forverts, the 19th and early 20th century Yiddish immigrants' daily. But its 7/18 editorial spoke for many gentile secularists as well.

"Something is wrong here. Separation of church and state has been a cornerstone of Democratic thinking more or less continuously since the days of Thomas Jefferson, founder of the party and architect of the proverbial wall of separation. Bush's faith-based initiative... opened a worrying breach in the wall. The next president should be planning to repair it. Instead the Democratic contender proposes turning the wall into a tollbooth."

Yet many readers may still sing the standard liberal 'would you rather have a Republican pick Supreme Court Judges?' as they vote for Obama. But let's ask a gut-basic constitutional question: If we could scroll Madison up to our day, would he vote for Obama? If Madison wouldn't vote for him, can we?

Scroll back to his day. Below this essay is his complete 1811 veto. Following it is part of his "Detatched Memoranda," written post-1817 after left the White House. Among other things, he asked "Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom?

In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U. S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them; and these are to be paid out of the national taxes. Does not this involve the principle of a national establishment, applicable to a provision for a religious worship for the Constituent as well as of the representative Body, approved by the majority, and conducted by Ministers of religion paid by the entire nation?"

An essay by the author of the Bill of Rights, questioning congressional chaplains, is obviously one of the most important documents on religion and politics ever penned, yet most Americans, including college-grads, don't know it exists.

Read the veto and Memoranda and I think you will join me in voting for Ralph Nader. But you should do more than that. Madison also wrote, in 1822, that "A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

Now as then, constitutional rights become real only when enough folks learn enough facts and principles derived from them so as to be able to educate and mobilize others to fight for those rights in courts, legislatures and streets. So circulate his Memo, whether you agree re Nader or not.

If we bring this secular classic to broad public attention as Barack and John McBama talk up church-state connections, voters can challenge them. What do they think of Madison's opposition to congressional clergy? And we must continue circulating it after the election, regardless of who wins. That "popular information" will help stop either President McBama from murdering the 1st Amendment. In fact, just as modern world-wide secular republican politics began with the American revolution, so global internet discussion of Madison's Memo can help build a "wall of separation" against today's religious demagogues and despots, everywhere.

___________
Lenni Brenner is the editor of Jefferson & Madison On Separation of Church and State: Writings on Religion and Secularism.

[Note: In referring to the 1st amendment's establishment clause, Madison uses "a religious establishment" instead of "an establishment of religion." - LB]


Having examined and considered the bill entitled "An Act incorporating the Protestant Episcopal Church in the town of Alexander, in the District of Columbia," I now return the bill to the House of Representatives, in which it originated, with the following objections:

Because the bill exceeds the rightful authority to which governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions, and violates in particular the article of the Constitution of the United States which declares 'Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.'

The bill enacts into and establishes by law sundry rules and proceedings relative purely to the organization and policy of the church incorporated, and comprehending even the election and removal of the minister of the same, so that no change could be made therein by the particular society or by the general church of which it is a member, and whose authority it recognizes. This particular church, therefore, would so far be a religious establishment by law, a legal force and sanction being given to certain articles in its constitution and administration. Nor can it be considered that the articles thus established are to be taken as the descriptive criteria only of the corporate identity of the society, inasmuch as this identity must depend on other characteristics, as the regulations established are in general unessential and alterable according
to the principles and canons by which churches of the denomination govern themselves, and as the injunctions and prohibitions contained in the regulations would be enforced by the penal consequences applicable to the violation of them according to the local law.

Because the bill vests in the said incorporated church an authority to provide for the support of the poor and the education of poor children of the same, an authority which, being altogether superfluous if the provision is to be the result of pious charity, would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty