The arch conservatives on the Supreme Court are supposed to be originalists?
Intellectually corrupt or just plain ignorant?
The United States was founded on the liberal/progressive ideas of the enlightenment. It was not founded on Christianity.
The United States was the first country at that time in history to openly reject any role for religion, a prohibition that appears twice in our Constitution and repeatedly in the writings of the Founding generation as you can read in great and astonishing detail here.
Religious leaders in the Founders’ day, in defense of church/state cooperation and collaboration, tried to argue that for centuries kings and queens in England had said that if the state didn’t support the church, the church would eventually wither and die. They wanted subsidies, like Bush’s and Trump‘s “faith based initiatives,” and to avoid all taxation.
“Father of the Constitution” James Madison, himself an active Christian, flatly rejected this argument, noting in a July 10, 1822 letter to Edward Livingston:
“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”
He added in that same letter:
“I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”
….
No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders and Framers of this nation in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, and no matter how imperfect and even brutal their time was, the simple reality is that in 1770’s America this nation’s Founders undertook history’s first truly great progressive experiment.
And they put their lives on the line to do it: when they signed their names on the Declaration, a death warrant was issued against each one of them by the largest and most powerful empire in the world.
But in the end, they believed they had succeeded.
As President George Washington wrote on March 15, 1790:
“As mankind become more liberal they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the Community are equally entitled to the protection of civil Government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality.”
https://hartmannreport.com/p/alito-thom ... trayal-de6
