-Eric
He was a brilliant legal mind, one of the founders and Chief Justice. His views are quite valid.
More proof that nobody is perfect.
Perhaps, no other documents came any closer to explain the thinking behind the writing and usefulness of the Constitution at the time than these Papers published and read avidly. The people of each state, those that voted on ratification, were influenced by them as by few other sources. While his role is not mentioned as much as Madison or Hamilton in their authorship, he wrote his share.
John Jay's sentiments were not uncommon for his day.
Many States had [protestant] religious establishements and desired to retain them and protect them from the new general government which was being created. Thus we have the 1st amendment which prohibits the Congress from establishing one Christian sect over another, for the Founders understood "religion" to mean revealed religion (Christianity). We who have come later have imbued the term "religion" with broader meaning. The sovereign States were free to establish standards for citizenship (as well as for holding public office), no matter how we might find such conditions reprehensible.
He was one of the authors of the Constitution, and, as Bork points out, of The Federalist Papers.
The liberty interest was defended not by Jay and his fellow Federalists, but by the Antifederalists like Patrick Henry, John Hancock, George Mason, and Samuel Adams, who insisted -- despite Hamilton's pettifogging in Federalist 84 -- on a Bill of Rights.
After ratification, Jay ascended the Supreme Court bench and promptly began handing down dicta in his opinions in which he attempted to reestablish those principia of Federalism that had been explicitly rejected by the Antifederalists and by the ratification conventions as a whole, and even by the Philadelphia Convention, such as amalgamation and relocation of sovereignty from the People in their States to some consolidated (and politically liquidated) uber-People whose "will" was expressed by the federal government as it dictated to the States (and the People, in their own name, a favorite theme of the Federalists/Republicans/Establishment ever since).