Your freedom to practice your religion means your freedom *from*
That's not the fed's job. It's in the First Amendment. Our founders
did not want to chill the free exercise of religion.
That is certainly true. That is why the Constitution was set up to insure that
government was neutral towards religion. You can't have free exercise of
religion of the government is playing favourites. That is why it was left to be
an individual decision, not to be compelled by the State.
Perhaps the ACLU would be offended on the principle of their hatred
for Catholicism, and not wishing to set a precedent.
Actually the root of the hatred for Catholicism in this country is with the
people who the fundies like to point at as our ideological founders...the
Pilgrims. The Puritans were extremely hostile towards Catholics and
Massachusetts in colonial times had the death penalty for simply being a
Catholic priest. When they overthrew the Calvert government in Maryland in the
1650s they enacted the death penalty for all Catholics in a colony which was
specifically set up as a Catholic haven. When the totalitarian theocratic
Cromwell government fell, the restored Crown quickly moved to restore religious
rights in Maryland.
It was primary because of the religious pogroms of the Puritans, as well as the
religious bloodbaths of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War which
led to the US Constitution being written the way it was.
This country was founded as a Christian, mostly
Prot, nation.
Some of the pre-constitution colonial governments certainly were. However their
genocidal policies against religious dissenters and Taliban-like laws is what
led to the founders who wrote the Constitution to reject a State religion.
As James Madison said in 1803, "The purpose of separation of church and state
is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the
soil of Europe in blood for centuries."
You want that ceaseless strife to begin again. Your views are more in common
with those of Osama Bin Laden then they are of the founders. Your hatred for
America has earned nothing but my contempt, traitor. You may be quoting Cal
Thomas in your sig but he is no conservative and neither are you.
Rich Goranson, Amherst, NY, USA (aa#MCMXCIX, a-vet#1)
"I am a conservative Republican, but I believe in democracy and the separation
of church and state. The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet
that people have the right to live life as they please as long as they don't
hurt anyone else in the process." - Sen. Barry Goldwater, Washington Post, 1994
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