Before anyone gets into my last previous posting about the Massachusetts Constitution providing for taxation in support of religions, I should confess to telling the truth in a lying manner. (But I deny being a politician, even if it may look like a politician's trick.)

Massachusetts doesn't "srike and replace" as their Constitution is amended. They simply add on a few more paragraphs. If you get the "annotated version" you may find the notes telling you what's been replaced by a later amendment, so the above "quote" is in the current document, but in the fine print you can find that the claim of authority for the Commonwealth to tax to pay for supporting (Protestant) religion was replaced by a granting to the religions themselves the authority to tax their members and a guarantee that the Commonwealth would enforce collection.

The footnotes indicate additional changes (after 1810), but I haven't travelled the entire maze to discern what the effective current document ends up saying. I sincerely doubt that more than a very few residents of Massachusetts could address the question with any real competence; but that doesn't make them significantly "inferior" to citizens of most of our states.

John