LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Susan Jacoby's Mother Jones article is a real study of history and what happens if you ignore it. I highly recommend it. But it was the last paragraph that really got my attention:

Handed a tabula rasa by a public uneducated in civics, right-wing revisionists are free to ignore not only the strong anticlerical views of so many of the nation's first leaders but also their loathing of all entanglements between religion and government. "Oh! Lord!" Adams complained in 1817 to his old friend and rival Jefferson. "Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland, Pensilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would." [emphasis mine -ed]

If they could they would. Wherever and whenever they could, they did—and that is why the revolutionary generation bequeathed the unique gift of a secular Constitution to future Americans. Here is the real history lesson, straight from the pens of the founders, that ought to be taught—and is too often ignored—in every American public school.

If you read the words of the hard core center of the Dominionist movement, you will see their almost gleeful desire to restore "Gods Law" to the land- basically following and enforcing the worst of the 613 laws of the Old Testement. They will kill homosexuals, adulterors (especially women) children who are 'willful', and pretty much anyone they perceive as an 'enemy of God's law'. They are already practicing on their own children, are raising up a generation who will think nothing of whipping and punishing their fellow humans in the name of God.

It's really ironic that nearly 300 years ago, people left Europe to escape that (or establish their own mini-cults) and deliberately created a Constitution that walled that kind of cruelty and legalistic interpretation of the Bible out of our laws. Now, people are chipping away at that wall- bulldozing it, even, and are champing at the bit to reinstate the 'whip and crop, and pillory and roast' as the law here. This isn't a 'might' kind of objective for the Dominionists, it's a 'will'- if they take over entirely.

If you get a chance, read Susan's book, "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism". It's an eye-opening history lesson.