I am glad to see an Actual Lawyer confirming that the First Amendment has six clauses, not the five that Sasse and Barrett cited, since that's the way I've been teaching it for decades.
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1316438833299324930
From a half-remembered law journal article I read sometime in the last century: Each of the six clauses in the First Amendment builds on the one that precedes it, so that if you remove any of the six, the ones that follow it collapse.
Freedom of belief, free exercise, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of petition. Swipe anything from that list, and everything after it is hollowed out and rendered meaningless.
The article was "Reading the Bill of Rights as a Poem," or something similar, by Burt Neuborne. Apparently he expanded it into a book a few years ago. law.nyu.edu/news/ideas/Bur…
(I am pleased to learn that I have been remembering it right all these years.)
As I explain it to my students, if you don't have the freedom to believe what you want, you can't have the freedom to practice your faith. If you don't have freedom of conscience, you don't have freedom of speech.
Without freedom of speech there can be no freedom of the press. And without freedom of speech and press there can be no freedom of assembly. And with no freedom of speech, press, and assembly there can be no petitioning of the government for redress of grievances.
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