In his long Mailbag letter published in the Burbank Leader on Wednesday, “Must look at the founders’ words,” David Kim trots out all the old cliches and myths about the intentions of the founders of our republic when they wrote the Constitution.
Cliché No. 1: The moldy old claim that “this country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles.”
The brilliant framers of our Constitution — James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and others — were products of the European Enlightenment, passionate secularists, and made every effort to ensure that the laws of our country were based on secular common sense instead of religious dogma.
This is most clearly stated in the first phrase of a treaty drafted in 1796 under George Washington, and signed by John Adams in 1797: “As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion . . . .” What could be clearer than that?