Eric Grant's Blog

08.30.2010 - I wrote this over a year ago during the height of the Tea Party protests, long before the right was calling for a ban on mosques and having Qur’an burning parties, and long before Glenn Beck was preaching that America should live by the rules of his God.

June 6, 2009 — Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck would all like you to believe the United States was founded as, and continues to be, a Christian nation. They would like you to believe the rights we enjoy as Americans were granted by their god and only their god. These radical neoconservatives forget that freedom from religious oppression is one of the founding principles which led to the formation of the United States of America. And there are a few key moments in history they would rather you forget:

1. In 1657 a group of early Americans signed a petition requesting the lifting of a ban on Quaker worship. The Flushing Remonstrance, as it is known, was the basis for the Constitution’s provision on freedom from religion in the Bill of Rights.


2. In 1788, James Madison writes in Federalist No. 51: “In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as for religious rights.”


3. Article Six of the Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” This is not an amendment to the Constitution; it’s the Founders’ original intent.


4. The First Amenedment to the Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”


5. The Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797, states in Article 11: “…the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;”


6. The doctrine of separation of church state, which can be attributed to Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802, has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court numerous times in favor of this principle.

The radical Fox News-loving conservatives who follow a “you’re with us or against us” mentality are no different than those radical Islamists who flew jets into buildings and murdered 2,974 people on September 11, 2001. These pseudo patriots who claim to cherish the Constitution and our founding principles are the same ones who want to destroy everything America stands for—freedom, diversity and equality under the law—and reduce us to nothing more than mindless subjects of a Christian theocracy.