The reason that idiots like Rick Santorum, and indeed most of the American political Right, get away with saying things is that they don't really know American history.
The other reason that idiots such as Santorum and most of the American political right get away with saying things like this is that almost all of the American political LEFT are just as dumb about American history.
Here's what they believe. The Pilgrims came to America for religious freedom, and our country was founded by Christians who believed in religious freedom.
That's simply not true. It has a grain, a germ, an element, a kernel of truth. But it is not the whole truth.
First, the Pilgrims weren't the first here.
Jamestown was a government colonization effort. Perhaps a licensed, sanctioned effort backing priavte efforts. Public private partnership? But it was done with government backing, certainly.
So you had these people here, those people there, of English descent. But the Dutch were in New Amsterdam. None of the above groups practiced the same religion, but they also didn't interact with each other, so there wasn't much need for "religious freedom."
A lot of people think the Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay Colony were more just additional Pilgrims who came after those Pilgrims at Plymouth.
Puritans and Pilgrims were hardly the same thing. Neither practiced what would be called the Church of England doctrine. But they were not the same faith.
We like to say they came here for religious freedom, but given what they did afterward, it is, on the face of it, plain that they instead came here escaping religious oppression.
To me, and to most Americans, the idea of religious freedom means freedom to practice your religion, whatever that may be.
To the Pilgrmis, it meant the the freedom to practice the Pilgrim faith. To the Puritans, it meant the freedom to practice the Puritan faith, and that faith alone. They believed in the primacy of the Bible, and that every person should be a minister, in a sense. But again, what happened afterward proves they didn't even toe that line perfectly.
Look up for yourself the name Anne Hutchinson. But to put it briefly, she was a woman who moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, got along well for a while, then had what she called a personal vision from Jesus, and started spreading a word that didn't quite fit the Puritan doctrine.
Look up also the name of Roger Williams.
I know about Anne Hutchinson because I looked her up as a child, and she came up in my good history class. There is a highway named for her in just north of New York City we drove on all the time.
In New York State? Why, one might ask, would a highway in that state be named for a woman who lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Simply put, because she was driven out of that colony for not fitting in as the church leaders.
Same deal with Roger Williams. One might know him as the founder of the state of Rhode Island. He named its capital city Providence because he believed he was brought there by God.
But he was also someone from the Massachusetts Bay Colony who did not fit in and who was driven into what was then the wilderness. What did he preach that was so offensive, by the way? The separation of church and state, among other wild ideas.
Both Hutchinson and Williams could have died because they had a different faith than those who came to America, we tell ourselves, seeking religious freedom. But they were seeking only the freedom of THEIR religion.
Look back at the history of our states and you will see a tapestry of religion. The Puritans faith has evolved into what is called Congregationalist, so they remain. I don't know a lot about it, but I respect its right to practice.
Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn, for Quakers. Most of the colonies were founded by those who followed the church of England, and were Anglican. Somehow, even a Catholic colony, Maryland, snuck into the mix, founded by William Carroll.
Just after the Bay Colony was founded, if a Catholic had wandered in, he would not have been welcome. He or she might have been at least driven out, as Hutchinson and Williams were. They might have been treated far worse.
Baptists managed to get themselves over to these colonies, but many of them scattered into the woods, some seeking unlimited elbow room. But many probably went to get away from their Anglican neighbors. In some states, such as Virginia, you were required to be on the rolls of of an Anglican church and required, by law, to pay tithe to church as well as tax to state.
Anyway, that's the background that doesn't get thrown into the mix. We know that our "fore-fathers" were being oppressed for their religious beliefs in bad old England.
But we ignore the fact, the historical fact, that once free of oppression there, most of our fore fathers started practicing it here.
It's saddening to see someone like Rick Santorum espousing beliefs such as what he says, and why John F. Kennedy was right on the mark in what he said about separation of church and state.
If Santorum had been born just 50 years earlier, and had gone into certain Southern towns and expressed his belief, he might have found his "Papist" butt run out of town on a rail. Or worse.
Hundreds of years past the institution in our law of freedom of religion, with a strong separation of churhc and state, Some enclaves still maintained bigoted, discriminatoty ideas and would have reacted even with violence to something from outside their own religion.
The Founding Fathers who wrote our Constitution and created the Bill of Rights put religious freedom into the constitution not only to get rid of laws requiring membership in this or that state religion, and to eliminate laws requiring a tithe to the church (this was a big one for Thomas Jefferson), but to keep the religious fractured landscape of the new country safe from each other.
They did it to keep Protestants from using the law to discriminate against Catholics, and vice versa. To keep families from being driven out into the wilderness,which America still had a bunch of in those days, because they didn't believe the same as the more established folks did.
In other words, the constitutional amendment that protects Christians practicing their faith, was put in place to protect these Christians from those Christians.
It's our history
