"Thou shalt have no other gods before me." "Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy." "Thou shalt not worship any graven image." "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain...." (You get the idea....)

DU, 2012: I've heard that Thomas Jefferson detested Patrick Henry.

Not that that's the gold standard. Anyway:

For Religious Freedom Day: What Jefferson Really Thought of Theocrat Patrick Henry

For Religious Freedom Day: What Jefferson Really Thought of Theocrat Patrick Henry
Categories: Uncategorized
by Chris Rodda

So, today {January 16} is Religious Freedom Day, the anniversary of the passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. No, I’m not going to post Jefferson’s statute; I’m going to post something cooler than that — one of my favorite lines ever written by Jefferson.

The background: Jefferson drafted his religious freedom statute in 1777 and introduced it in 1779, but it didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t until 1786 that Jefferson’s statute was passed. Jefferson was in France at the time, so it was Madison who reintroduced the religious freedom statute. This was right after James Madison defeated Patrick Henry’s bill to tax everybody in Virginia to support teachers of the Christian religion.

Jefferson couldn’t stand Patrick Henry and his theocratic agenda, and made this quite clear in one {of} his letters to Madison while Madison was battling Henry’s bill for a Christian religious tax. When Madison wrote to Jefferson asking what they should do about Henry, Jefferson replied:

“While Mr. Henry Lives another bad constitution would be formed, and saddled for ever on us. What we have to do I think is devoutly to pray for his death …”

Of course, the Christian nationalist history revisionists either ignore this line from Jefferson, or claim it is made up by evil secularists to impugn the character of our very Christian founding fathers.
....

{This is} from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to James Madison on December 8, 1784, and can be found on pages 353-354 of The Republic Of Letters, The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776-1826, Volume I.

“No American should have to choose between faith and the law.”

Clearly this conservative nonsense is in reference to state and local public accommodations laws with provisions for sexual orientation, and the lie that such laws ‘compel’ Christian business owners to ‘violate’ their religious beliefs by providing goods and services to gay and transgender patrons, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

Requiring citizens to obey just, proper, and Constitutional laws and measures – such as public accommodations laws – is perfectly consistent with settled, accepted Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence. (See, e.g., Employment Division v. Smith (1990)).