Bigotry rules in the USA

Disagreeing with Senator McCain and millions of Americans are the Founding Fathers, most of whom were Deists; some were agnostics; a few were Christians or Jews:

[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” according to Article 11 of The Treaty of Tripoli, written near the end of George Washington’s presidency, unanimously approved by the Senate, and signed by John Adams in June 1797. That same treaty also established that the United States “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity [sic], of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The Treaty itself was an extension of the principles enunciated within the Constitution. Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution is clear that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”. The First Amendment assures not only a separation of church and state, but the right of any person to practice any religion - or no religion.

Thomas Jefferson said that his Bill for Religious Liberty in Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination”.

George Washington, the year after his inauguration, wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., to tell them that “happily the government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance … Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Explaining what James Madison and the other Founding Fathers intended, Jefferson as president in 1802 wrote, “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.”

The Supreme Court of the United States twice used Jefferson’s argument to rule that the Constitution, although it doesn’t specifically spell it out, does include an “establishment clause” to preserve the separation of church and state.

Abraham Lincoln later quashed all attempts to create a Constitutional amendment that would have established America not only as a Christian nation, but would impose Christianity as the official state religion.

Nevertheless, the action of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the blathermouths who populate talk radio and the Internet, and the apologists who whine that Senator Obama is really a 100 per cent genuine practicing Christian, make it obvious that a large part of Americans not only fail to appreciate the structure of what is America, but in their own misguided form of Christianity fail to understood the values of the Jew named Jesus Christ.