Lenni Brenner: Jefferson, Madison, Bush and Religion

Lenni Brenner: Jefferson, Madison, Bush and Religion: "December 4 / 6, 2004 | 'It is Safer to Trust the Consequences of a Right Principle, Than Reasonings in Support of a Bad One.'
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...Antigay feeling, combined with clerical greed for US funding for church-run drug clinics, raised Bush's Black vote from 8% in 2000, to 11%. His Hispanic vote went from 31% to 43%.
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Bush's support for Sharon, lust for government funding of yeshivas, & gut-basic Old Testament hatred of Sodomites, propelled 70% of Orthodox Jewry into Bush's camp. But Orthodoxy is less than 10% of American Jewry.
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Article VI: 3 "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and the several States, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
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Our bipartisan hacks get away with religious demagoguery because 66% of Americans don't know that "We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal" is from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Fifty-three percent don't know that the 1st 10 amendments to the constitution are called the Bill of Rights, much less who authored it.
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And indeed Jefferson's 1800 election as President was the high point of patriotic anticlericalism.

His most famous Presidential statement in his period is from an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."
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In any case, there is no doubt that Madison's anticlericalism increased with experience. He asked

"Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom?

"In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U. S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them; and these are to be paid out of the national taxes. Does not this involve the principle of a national establishment, applicable to a provision for a religious worship for the Constituent as well as of the representative Body, approved by the majority, and conducted by Ministers of religion paid by the entire nation.

"The establishment of the chaplainship to Congs is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles:
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No mincing words, no evasions, no hypocrisy: Bush & the "Judeo-Christian" right are trying to destroy Jefferson's domestic "wall of separation between Church and State," wholesale, while the Democrats will destroy it retail, but just as assuredly destroy it.