OUR FATHERS TRIED TO TELL US

Gavel Gamut

By Jim Redwine

(Week of 30 March 2015)

OUR FATHERS TRIED TO TELL US

Keep government out of religion and religion out of government and never form a habitual passion for or against any other country: sage advice from our Founding Fathers.

The first clause of the First Amendment is:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, and the brilliant separation of powers doctrine were the foundation upon which George Washington, truly the Father of Our Country, and his fellow freedom fighters built our Constitution.

They knew from history and personal experience governments could not be trusted to do the right thing. We humans cannot long restrain our desire to impose our beliefs on others. Therefore, our Nation of Laws must keep our passions in check.

Washington feared another danger to our country as much as he feared mixing religion and government. His Farewell Address of 1796 could just as well be given in 2015 in warning that the greatest danger to America is our current, “[I]nveterate antipathies against particular nations (Iran, Iraq, Syria, etc.) and passionate attachment for others (Israel) …”

“The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection.

….

… a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation into the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions, by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.”

As if either convoluting government with religion or passionately hating Iran, et. al., while passionately loving Israel were not danger enough alone, we have combined these two chimeras. Our Founding Fathers would be trembling.

(Portions of this article were previously published in Gavel Gamut articles July 2010. Considering current events you can see how influential they were.)