Below I have reproduced Mims' letter in its entirety since I do not know how long it will be available on the paper's website.
Who knows what another person believes?
In a recent letter, Howard A. McKissack accused Steve Schlicht of attacking God. Mr. Schlicht had written a letter stating that our Constitution contains a First Amendment, not a First Commandment. His main points were that religions are as morally relative as any other world view, changing with time, changing internally as well as spinning off new sects as they go, and that the First Amendment establishes a wall of separation between church and state so that no one sect would be favored over any other.
This hardly constitutes an attack on God.
Mr. McKissack goes on to claim that most of if not all of the signers of the Bill of Rights were God-fearing men. He also accuses Mr. Schlicht of not researching the First Amendment thoroughly. If he had researched it a little more himself, he would have discovered that the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, had no signers. The amendments were ratified by the states during the first Congress in 1791, not signed at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. James Madison called it a "line in the sand" between church and state. Thomas Jefferson more famously called it a "wall of separation."
While conceding this point, Mr. McKissack concludes his letter stating that the rights outlined in the First Amendment were granted to us "by men who believed in one sovereign God." I would ask Mr. McKissack how he knows this? Knowing what other people really believe is very hard. Everyone's beliefs can change as new experiences, new evidence, new insights, all sorts of inputs, occur. I could make all sorts of good arguments against Mr. McKissack's blanket statement, but in this limited space all I will say is that he has no right to make such a claim. All we know of the leaders of our new country is that at the beginning of our democracy, the majority of them thought it wise to protect religious belief from government interference, and protect government from religious interference, by establishing a firm wall between them.
MIMS CARTER
Pass Christian
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