Stephan: The Founders disagreed about a number of things, but one thing they mostly did agree on was they wanted religion and the state to be completely separate. Why did they feel so strongly about this? Probably because they or others within their immediate family history had suffered from the fact that in Britain church and state were one. Since Henry VIIIth the king had also been the head of the Anglican Church, and the Founders did not want that in their new country. But throughout our history, there have always been those who did want their religious beliefs and institutions to control the state. And at this moment our Supreme Court has become a hotbed of such individuals. As the recent decision by the court in the Texas abortion rights case illustrates we are in serious danger of destroying an already compromised judicial system.
This essay, with which I concur, accurately lays out reality. I find it is interesting that Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in classic fascist denial protocol, denied the obvious when she said the justices of the court were not partisan hacks.
Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh Photo illustration by Salon/Getty
The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.”
What forthright American declared such words? Bill Maher? Christopher Hitchens? Emma Goldman? No. They come from the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated under George Washington, approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797.
This early declaration — along with the First Amendment, which Thomas Jefferson solemnly revered “as building a wall of separation between church and state” — illustrates the unprecedented experiment our founders sought to test: a secular republic ruled by democratic laws, not sectarian faith; a nation whose government based its authority upon “we, the people” and not commandments handed down by distant gods. It is a brilliant endowment, given that in a pluralistic democracy such as ours, with people of many faiths and no faiths at all, we purposefully govern ourselves via secular legislation, not religious decrees.
But today, this bold pillar of American democracy is rotting fast. It is under attack by theocrats, especially those who sit on our Supreme […]
