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The Constitution's "church and state" clause has been a source of disagreement concerning the intent of the founding fathers.  The Claremont Institute has provided an essay titled Religious Liberty - A View from the Founding, by Thomas G. West, which takes a somewhat moderate and mainstream position that is in many ways consistent with States' Liberty policies..

"The victory of relativism has made the Founders' understanding of religious liberty alien to us. Liberty today is taken to mean "the right to choose," the right to do whatever one pleases.

Surprisingly, both liberals and conservatives agree on this definition. Their disagreement is over the extent to which government should impose limits on abuses of liberty. A sign of our shared view of liberty is that we often speak of balancing liberty with order, with responsibility, or with community. If we define liberty as the unlimited right of the irresponsible will, we do have to look to a source outside of liberty for some restraint on it. But if liberty is inherently responsible liberty, as the Founders thought, it does not need to be balanced by anything. It contains within itself its own balance. "

The States' Liberty Party holds a strict code of behavioral morality for the protection of liberty, for there is no liberty when the rights of  even one individual are trampled.  Typically, the weak and unrepresented suffer at the hands of established social giants, as occurred in this country with slavery and segregation, and today with a wholesale abuse of the birth process.  While the public may respond favorably toward a more educated thought, policy makers and social/political officials will naturally resist, seeing the alternate idea as threatening and unfamiliar.

"Since we no longer distinguish between liberty and license, we no longer understand the Founders' conception of liberty, including religious liberty. For them, the freedom to follow one's religion should be protected, in Washington's words, as an "inherent natural right." No one may be harmed or punished for his mode of worship. But religious liberty is not religious license. Government may therefore prohibit religious practices that are criminal or immoral. And government may and should promote religious practices and convictions that accord with reason, which favors individual responsibility and political liberty. "

The Religious Liberty text may give the reader a hint of the difference between faith based morality and coherent logic derived from reason and common sense.  The former, in fact, is (hopefully) a faithful carrying out of the latter without full a comprehension as to why.

"I propose to show that although most of the Founders wanted a "separation between church and state" — call it a "wall of separation" if you like — they emphatically rejected a wall of separation between religion and public life, between God and politics. The Founders opposed an official state-sponsored church, but they favored government support of religion through public laws, in official speeches and proclamations, on ceremonial occasions, and especially in public schools. "

States' Liberty Party adheres to the idea that a central "Union of States" government founded on atheism will be prepared to guarantee religious freedom to both individuals and states, but a single federal entity demanding a uniformity among the separate states will guarantee tyranny, and atheism will be the state religion.   This happens when religion but not atheism is banned from public education centers that have a federally mandated requirement of attendance.

Remarkably, the special protection the founding fathers afforded to religion was turned around by activist courts in the last century to deny the same rights to religions as granted to every other art and science (traditional religion, but no other social idea or theory has been banned by the court from states' institutions).

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Last modified: April 24, 2005   Copyright © States' Liberty Party TM

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