Many of us read Inherit the Wind in middle school or high school growing up. It is the story about the Scopes Monkey Trial that began today, July 10, in 1925. We are taught about this moment in our country's history in order to make two things crystal clear to us: 1) It is THE example of why our Founding Fathers stipulated the separation between Church and State and 2) Our country has the ability to right both our own as well as humanities' wrongs when reason is applied. With recent partisan decisions by the Supreme Court concerning Hobby Lobby and women's rights, it is essential, now more than ever, we remember WHY our country's best and brightest fought for the separation between Church and State. Clarence Darrow said it best below:
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
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