What are Ohio's "restoration" groups trying to restore?

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Tuesday September 19, 2006 · 7:14 PM PDT

2006/09/19 · 19:14

I've finished transcribing Rob Boston's talk to the central Ohio chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. You can find the complete transcript of the talk here. Below, you will find just a small portion of the talk (which ran about 45 minutes before the Q and A part started). Here is where Rob Boston speaks about the Ohio groups that have been cropping up, and what sort of worldview they aim to "restore".

Well, you know, you look at the agenda of these groups, and they use this word restoration--Ohio Restoration Project. What are they trying to restore? They would tell you they are trying to restore something the founding fathers came up with that was abandoned. But, they're not. Because we know the founding fathers advocated for the secular state. What they are trying to restore is a period, post-Civil War, what I call the "Christian nation" where a lot of the laws reflect conventional Christian doctrine. Sunday closing laws for businesses, censorship of books and the mail. If anything was deemed blasphemous, you couldn't put it in the mail. The post office would crack down on that material--a lot of freethought material was banned. And other types of religiously inspired laws inspired, not by what the founders gave us, but kind of an abberant period in our history, where we did, for a good number of years, drift away from the separation of church and state.

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What are Ohio's "restoration" groups trying to restore?

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