Pennsylvania, it’s sometimes said, can best be understood as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh separated by Alabama. Geographically speaking it’s a big state in the heart of the liberal Northeast, home to great universities, Ben Franklin and the Liberty Bell, anchored by a great Eastern metropolis at one end and a once-booming Midwestern steel town at the other. Everything in between, though, is rural, gun-totin’, Bible-thumpin’ country.
It’s no surprise, then, that every peculiarity of America’s perpetual religious quarreling seems to collide in Pennsylvania. It was founded as a haven for religious dissenters by Quaker leader William Penn, who envisioned Philadelphia as a city of brotherly love. It is the cradle of American tolerance, where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, where the Constitution and Bill of Rights were signed. More recently, it was the scene of a celebrated court battle over a local school board’s effort to make biology students learn divine creationism — they called it Intelligent Design — in a town called Dover, just above the Mason-Dixon Line.
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