Church and State: Do not tear down that wall

Susan Jacoby, author, most recently, of The Age of American Unreason, has a powerful op-ed in the NY Times, about the systematic chiseling away of the separation of church and state. She notes that it started with President Clinton, was massively expanded by President Bush, and is being continued on by President Obama. Jacoby writes:

President Obama might also take a moment to reread the religious freedom act passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786, with strong support from both Baptists and freethinkers. That law, which prohibited tax support for religious teaching in public schools, became the template for the establishment clause of the First Amendment and also helped establish our American tradition of government freedom from religious interference and religious freedom from government interference.

Yet we are moving blindly ahead with faith-based federal spending as if it were not a radical break with our past. If faith-based initiatives, first institutionalized by the executive fiat of a conservative Republican president, become even more entrenched under a liberal Democratic administration, there will be no going back. In place of the First Amendment, we will have a sacred cash cow.