Separation of Church & State

I'm sure you've heard by now that President Obama, on his 51st day in office, will OK spending another $410 billion of our money. And, if you've been watching Fox, you've seen that Nancy Pelosi is throwing a temper tantrum because she can't have a specific military plane for her little Memorial Day party. Someone ought to file an FOIA request to see how much she's costing us just in her personal travels and vacations.

Because the omnibus spending bill is all you're going to be hearing about on the news tomorrow, I wanted to point out something else. With Obama lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research and providing more public money for abortions, there's growing concern about whether doctors who view abortion as murder will be forced to do them. Saying public health trumps a person's right to stand by his or her convictions, a number of federal lawmakers want to force doctors -- and pharmacists -- to do abortions and dispense morning-after pills. Oh yeah, those misguided lawmakers also cite separation of church and state.

Now that argument gets me. The First Amednment says nothing about separation of church and state. What it does is forbid Congress from establishing a church. To understand the intent of our Founding Fathers on this issue, we must think about the context.

Before the birth of our country, many of the colonies had an established church paid for by the colonial government -- i.e., the taxpayers of that colony. Take Virginia, for instance. Colonial Virginians were forced to pay a tithe to the Church of England. That meant my Swiss Mennonite and staunch Scottish Covenanter ancestors who settled in Virginia in the 1600s and 1700s had to pay money to the Church of England in addition to supporting their own churches, which did not receive public money. Robert Ewing, one of my first ancestors in this country, wrote a letter to the Virginia legislators that he sent along with his tithe, thanking them for allowing the Ewings and others in Peaks of Otter, Va., to worship at a Presbyterian church.

This was what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote his famous letter describing his OPINION about the "wall" he perceived between church and state. None of our Founding Fathers would have denied anyone the strength of his or her personal convictions. In fact, it was because of their personal convictions that the likes of George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Marion, etc., stood up and told King George what he could do with his misplaced power. Our Founding Fathers were willing to sacrifice their lives to establish a country where people would be free to worship and follow their convictions in every aspect of their lives.

The question we now face is: What are we willing to do to protect that freedom?