Originally Posted by 1CAVCCO15MED
"In newly independent America, there was a crazy quilt of state laws regarding religion. In Massachusetts, only Christians were allowed to hold public office, and Catholics were allowed to do so only after renouncing papal authority. In 1777, New York State's constitution banned Catholics from public office and would do so until 1806. In Maryland, Catholics had full rights but Jews did not. Delaware required an oath affirming the trinity. Several states, including Massachusetts and South Carolina had state supported churches.
In 1779, as Virginia's governor, Thomas Jefferson drafted legal equality for citizens of all religions---including atheists---in the state. 'But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty Gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' The law 'was meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew, the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the infidel of every denomination."
Washington wrote to Touro Synegogue in Newport, Rhode Island on the freedom of religion we enjoyed, 'All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship.....For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.'
James Madison also made a point that any believer of any religion should understand: 'The same authority that can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christianity to the exclusion of all other sects." He was writing from his memory of Baptist ministers being arrested in his native Virginia.
Madison perceived the nation in 1785, 'An asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every nation and religion'
Later in his life, James Madison wrote a letter summarizing his views, 'And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Gov'twill both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
In Massachusetts, a convent---coincidentally near the Bunker Hill Monument was burned to the ground by an anti Catholic mob incited by reports that young women were being abused in the convent school.
In Philadelphia anti-Catholic sentiment fueled the Bible Riots of 1844, in which houses were torched, two Catholic churches destroyed and at least 20 people were killed.
In October 1832, rouge militiamen massacred 17 church members, including children, at the Mormon settlement of Haun's Mill.
And let's not forget the 1925 lynching of Jew Leo Frank by an angry mob in Atlanta, Ga.
|