Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

bulldzr --

thanks for your thoughts -- my response:

you can rest assured that I do not underestimate dubya, or those who run him -- instead, perhaps I'm giving us all a bit more credit than you are for the ability to recognize the lies and bs and the attacks on our rights and liberties we're being force-fed by this administration for what they are, and to get off our butts to go vote to prevent four more years of this administration -- it's gonna be a tough and ugly campaign, no doubt, but I see the reality of what dubya and gang have been up to since dubya took office catching up with him and proving his undoing -- to me at least, it's clear that that's already happening, and I don't see that trend reversing or disappearing before the election

re the Declaration of Independence -- its purpose was to list our immediate grievances with the Crown and to sever ourselves from the Crown as the only means left to us to redress those grievances -- and as a practical matter here at that time, oppression specifically of religious freedom by the Crown just was not a burning issue; as a practical matter, people here then in fact by and large had freedom of religion, which of course was a primary reason why many if not most who had come here up to that time had done so -- accordingly, I respectfully disagree with your inference from the text of the Declaration of Independence that people here then didn't care much about freedom of religion; they cared deeply about it, it just wasn't in fact a big immediate issue between them and the Crown at that time

lastly, of course the American Revolution was about money and power, as well as individual rights and liberties; but that is not at all inconsistent with, nor does it in any way change, the fact that separation of church and state, as essential to securing all individual rights and liberties and not only freedom of religion, was a fundamental principle guiding the formation of this nation, as fundamental as any other embodied in the Constitution