Are real Americans left or right? A true American is both. When the elected official in Texas opened the meeting with a prayer the media was all over it. Now if you study Jefferson he many times cautioned against doing such. However, he would have given his life to allow her because of her personal right to exercise her belief, even in public and even as an elected official. As americans we have to understand where we came from and exercise tolerance for each other. Today we label and harrass each other when our own history will tell us what we should do.

-- this one don't do it ---

"To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302, Papers 2: 546


---- this one don't stop them ---

"The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:546