UNITED
STATES DISTRICT COURTS

(1983), Southern District of Alabama, in the case of Jaffree v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County, 544 F.Supp. 1104 (S.D. Ala. 1983), Judge Brevard Hand quoted from the nineteenth-century U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who succinctly clarified the original meaning of the First Amendment:

The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects and to prevent any national ecclesiastical patronage of the national government.4007