Religion under a secular assault

Oral arguments were to begin before the U.S. Supreme Court on one of the most litigated questions in American law: Should the Ten Commandments be displayed on government property? Outside, protesters sang hymns and held up signs proclaiming "The 10 Commandments: The way to live your life." A few feet away, a larger group clustered around Ellen Birch, a member of American Atheists, who describes herself as a descendant of Thomas Jefferson. "A favorite claim of fundamentalists," she told anyone listening, is that America is "indebted to the Bible and Christianity for our laws." Not so, Miss Birch says. "State support of a religion leads to corruption within both government and religion," she says, adding that Jefferson himself said, "The wall of separation between church and state was absolutely essential in a free society."

Miss Birch says. "(blah, blah)... Jefferson himself said, "The wall of separation between church and state was absolutely essential in a free society."

What really, REALLY, ticks me off is these leftists take this one phrase that Jefferson used in a letter as the 'gospel truth' (pun intended), yet these same people will immediately turn around and utterly IGNORE all 97 gazillion references in the Federalist Papers and other letters of the Founding Fathers, that the Right To Keep And Bear Arms is an individual right.

Birth of the ACLU

Roger Baldwin, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a Chicago-based radical labor group, founded the ACLU. He was a Unitarian, a denomination that believes in God but not in the divinity of Christ.

When Mr. Baldwin refused to join the military in 1918, he went to prison for a year as a conscientious objector. Soon after Mr. Baldwin's release, on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer jailed thousands of anarchists and labor activists for suspected communist activities.

A month after 249 foreign-born activists were deported to Russia in December 1919, Mr. Baldwin organized the ACLU. The group's early causes included defending John Scopes, arrested in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925 for teaching the theory of evolution in defiance of state law.

"The ACLU was the legal arm of militant labor," says Bill Donohue, founder of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, whose 1980 doctoral thesis examined the group. "From the beginning, they were tied to the politics of the left. It was hard-core left. They justified Stalinism."

Mr. Baldwin visited Stalin's brutal police state in 1923 and 1927 and praised it in a book, "Liberty Under the Soviets."

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