The Founding Fathers must be frowning on House Speaker John Boehner; you can almost envision the furrow on Thomas Jefferson’s brow. How could this fine conservative lawmaker from Ohio, who often cloaks himself in the Constitution, go on a crusade to give federal funds to D.C.’s Catholic schools? What happened to the separation of church and state?
It was Jefferson who first articulated the notion that the new country he helped found should create some distance between organized religion and the its government. In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, he wrote that he contemplates “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 & State.”
