One of the most fundamental goals of the modern religious liberty movement can be summed up in two words—legal equality. The government should grant religious organizations, individuals, and programs the same rights and privileges it grants to their secular counterparts. The most fundamental goal of a late 19th-century American politician named James Blaine was religious discrimination.
He capitalized on a wave of post-Civil War anti-Catholic fervor and proposed a now-infamous federal constitutional amendment that would have banned public funding for so-called “sectarian” institutions. His original proposed alteration to the First Amendment read.
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