Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders & Framers in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, the reality is that America was history's first great liberal experiment...
While Trump-humping Republicans like to misquote the Founders of this nation and pretend a similar patriotism, the simple reality is that all of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution would have been disgusted by these modern-day grifters.
For example:
Today's Republicans claim that America was founded as a Christian nation; the truth is that one of the most unique things about the "American experiment" was that we were the first explicitly secular nation in the history of the world.
Every country, throughout history prior to the 1770s, was either run by a specific religion (from King David's day through the Holy Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire and beyond); a collaboration between church and state (French kings and Catholic popes; English kings and the Church of England); by a hereditary leader claiming to descend from divinity (Alexander the Great, the Pharaohs, the Japanese royal family); or by a breakaway sect claiming to speak for their god (Mormons in Salt Lake City, the Pilgrim political leaders in early Massachusetts).
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.
"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."
Madison also opposed "- although, as president, he couldn't stop "- the appointment of chaplains for Congress.
"Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom?" he asked in 1820. His answer: "In the strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. ...The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles."
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