Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 731

bodies. They haven't yet had to grapple with Moslems, but they don't know what they will do when they come to that.

To me the idea is disgusting that there is any hazard, or ever has been any hazard in this country, of the Roman Catholic Church, or any Protestant body, or any group of Protestant bodies, taking control of the machinery of government and the mechanisms of government. Thus the whole discussion strikes a responsive note in me because I've been so irritated of recent years since this thing has sprung up. I know what the Constitution says. I know what the founding fathers had in mind when they put that clause into the Constitution - “there has been no establishment of religion.”

* In the manuscript a marginal note is pencilled here: “Check (?)”

The people who wrote that had come out of England or under the denomination of England and they knew all about paying taxes to support the established church. I get so very angry at this exaggeration. The founding fathers didn't want any particular church, and particularly the Church of England - that's what they were thinking of - to get settled on them as something that they had to support by taxes. The Church of England was supported by taxes on the people. The people had to pay the tax to support the church. They had not only a general tax throughout the country, but a tax in the parish in which you lived. If you were an atheist,





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help