Perhaps getting less deserted….

LiveJournal has apparently become seriously compromised by Russia. This inconveniences me minimally, as I’ve made little use of it in the past year. I’ll probably move elsewhere in the long run, but in the interim I’ll dust this off.

Jeff Sessions

So, over at another WordPress site, someone is claiming it is “false” that

Jeff Sessions said that the separation of church and state was “an extra-constitutional doctrine” and “recent thing that is unhistorical and unconstitutional.”

It traces the quotes as far as this book, but then claims that “there does not appear to be any reference to these quotes” in the source given by the book and that “there does not appear to be any transcript or article on the Internet that supports this claim”. This is an overstatement at best.

Checking via Amazon Preview, it seems the full Edwards reference is to Hans Johnson’s article “Warning: Severe Sessions Ahead”, published in the January 1997 issue of “Church and State” magazine, which is a publication of “Americans United for Separation of Church and State” — a group that is perhaps not exactly unbiased, but technically not atheist. With work, an on-line copy of this article can be found. (At least one other site gives the relevant sections in a partial copy.) They report his phrase there as “extra-constitutional doctrine”, allegedly used in a speech given in May 1996 in Mobile, Alabama. It does not provide additional context by quoting any further extent of the speech. I have not been able to turn up an independent report of that speech.

However, the Johnson article also sources the “recent thing that is unhistorical and unconstitutional” quote as having come from an interview with Sessions in The Alabama Baptist (a weekly publication of the Alabama Baptist Church); no specific date is given, but it is indicated as “later” than the Mobile speech, necessarily must have been before Johnson’s article was published, and (being characterized as part of an election campaign) likely before November. This leaves a window of around 30 issues (mostly or all in volume 161 of the publication) that would need to be searched for definitive proof. The website for The Alabama Baptist does not include any pre-2000 articles, but notes that (Alabama’s) Samford University’s special collections includes an extensive collection of (most?) articles prior to 2000. The Samford University library’s catalog indicates that Volume 161 is in its collection. This could potentially provide independent verification.

Finally, this quote does not appear to be contradicted by any sentiments Sessions has publicly expressed — or at least, none turning up in my quick search for those. It thus appears an overstatement to call the claim “false”, when “unproven” seems more precise — especially as it seems likely provable to ordinary standards of sourcing.