Conscience is the most sacred of all property

On a recent airing of The Factor, Bill O’Reilly questioned Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh about the anomaly between Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism and his pro-abortion stance.

Marsh quickly replied that the late senator had observed a separation of church and state.

Her facile reply betrays a profound misunderstanding of the principle of separation of church and state, and worse, an approval for the suppression of expressing deeply held conviction. Both problems beg serious comment.

“From Tyndale to Madison: How the Death of an English Martyr Led to the American Bill of Rights,” by Michael Farris, offers a quick and informative read on the history of centuries of persecutions of various religious sects in the English speaking world.

Persecutions of those sects outside the mainstream included not only jail and sometimes death, but when religious tolerance was practiced at all, restrictions were placed on when and where believers could meet and what they could preach.

Moreover, all citizens were taxed in order to fund state supported clergy even when that clergy professed doctrine contrary to doctrine held by dissenting sects.

The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom made religious taxes illegal and allowed for liberty of religious opinion, and our subsequent Bill of Rights was crafted such that divergent opinions were protected in the free expression of one’s beliefs.

To suggest that separation of church and state precludes voicing one’s deeply held beliefs in the public forum is not only a gross misunderstanding of the freedom conveyed by the Bill of Rights, but is a grotesque inversion from freedom to repression.

On March 27, 1792, the National Gazette published an essay penned by James Madison on The Right to Property and Property in Rights.

Madison wrote, “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort, as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.”

Property is not limited to the material and tangible, but includes a body of rights among which are a man’s “opinions and the free communication of them.” “Conscience,” Madison continues, “is the most sacred of all property.”

If we may not bring conscience into discussion of public policy, then what else have we to bring? And what is religious affiliation but the formal expression of one’s convictions and conscience?

In a democratically represented republic, the conscience of one individual might not be reflected in ultimate public policy, but if we deny that person the right to freely express his conscience for the sake of political expedience, then we not only have trampled that person’s most sacred property, but we have denied the very essence of what it is to be an American.

This is serious business, indeed.

Louise Friend

Friendsville