Julia McDonald-Smith is long on opinion, short on substance.

“An Independence Day gift from the pulpit” (The Right View, July 6) cites a priest’s homily, which, save for faulting the abortion of “3,000 innocent lives per day,” otherwise, from McDonald-Smith’s summary, appears to merely rehearse the U.S. Catholic bishops’ extended sore-loser “religious liberty” effort to tar government’s provision for contraceptive care and recognition of the civil rights of same-sex couples.

In arguing that government has “taken God out of our Country,” McDonald-Smith turns for evidence to an early law-making blasphemy a capital offense.

History 101 for Julie: The Constitution’s promise of equality and liberty were at odds with a dominant Protestant culture and slavery.

Conscience and violence ended legal slavery; we have yet to assure de facto racial equality.

That Protestant culture’s accommodation of equality has been as slow. Where the Founding Fathers sent their children to church-run schools supported by taxes, with the mass immigration of Catholics, Protestant political power denied tax funds to Catholic schools by creating nominally Protestant public schools that commanded all education tax funds and, stripped of their Bible readings and Christian prayer, largely still do.

The present frontier is not “progressives” trying to “undermine and destroy our Judeo-Christian founding and all it has meant to our success,” but responsible citizens simply honoring the promise of equality to all.

William H. Slavick
Portland