The first amendment should be expanded to further remove religion from government

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." This is the text of the first amendment to the United States' constitution. However, recently, the separation of church and state, one of the fundamental building blocks of our nation, has been blurred. Many politicians in the House of Representatives and the Senate have tried, and in some cases succeeded, in passing legislation that supports religious principles. For example, during the recent Supreme Court case, where bans on gay marriage were declared to be unconstitutional, the primary argument against gay marriage was religious. People argued that gays shouldn't be allowed to marry because in the certain interpretations of the Christian bible, being gay is considered a sin. Also, this problem has reared its ugly head in debates on global warming. Certain politicians have argued that since in the Christian bible, the Christian God gives man (extended to mean all humans) domain of the earth to do with it as they desire. Even presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is running on making America a more Christian country, stating that our founding fathers founded the USA as a Christian nation. In reality, they strongly rejected such a notion, as stated in article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, a treaty signed in the late 1700s, which reads as follows: "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion..." The rest of the article has been omitted, as it is relevant to the treaty of Tripoli, which was signed by the USA and certain pirates. The whole treaty can be found here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu... My argument is that the first amendment should be expanded to disallow any religious argument from being used to support or oppose any United States legislation. While by no means the prefect amendment, an example of the extension to the amendment could be something along the lines of: "Being that there exists a separation of church and State, Congress shall make no law based with in and of religion." First off, I'd like to begin my rebuttal by telling you that I am new to Debate .org, and I'm sorry if I accidentally repost my first round argument. Now, onto the debate. Having read your argument, I think we actually are not far from identifying the common issue. I'm not saying that any law with any link to religion is wrong; far from it. I'm only saying that no law should be able to be passed with religion as the central tenet. For example, let's go back to the climate change argument I used in round one. To expand on it, we'll pretend that a bill is to be introduced to the House of Representatives that would make it illegal for states to use cap-and-trade bills. For context, cap-and-trade bills place a cap on, in this case, carbon emissions, that a company must abide by. Each company is given a certain amount of Carbon Credits based on company size, each of which allow a certain amount of pollution. However, if the company doesn't use all its credits, it can sell them to companies that need more credits to keep up with their pollution levels. Now, as long as the legislators have any good reason behind the law, for example they may believe that such bills harm the economy, my proposed amendment wouldn't apply here. Just because the Christian Bible says that God has given people dominion over the earth doesn't mean that the legislators are using that as the reason to push the bill through. However, if they did use that as their reason, the law would then be unconstitutional. So to generalize, as long as there is any rational reason that is not by its very nature religious, then I have no problem with it. Now to address the fourth paragraph of your Round One argument. In the first sentence, you say it would be more reasonable to limit any ideological thinking in law when it would interfere with others' freedoms. Here, I don't disagree; however, much like the first amendment there would need to be limitations. Nobody should be able to say that since their religion supports murder, they should be allowed to murder people. That's absurd. Moving on, the rest of your fourth paragraph, while reasonable on the surface, is really not relevant to the debate. As I said in the first part of my rebuttal, there is a rational reason (actually many reasons) that murder should be a crime. Just because some religions happen to think murder is a bad thing doesn't mean that religion is the only argument against murder. So in conclusion, I'm not saying that since I don't agree with certain religions, that they should be removed or silenced. Just as it is my right to say that there is no god, it is just as equally your right to say that there is a god, and this is his/her/its word. But that doesn't mean that laws can be passed in a secular nation based on a certain religion without a good non-religious based reason.