Separation of FACT and Fiction
​You'll want to be sure to mark your calendar for Historical Fiction Day coming up this Sunday, Jan. 10, brought to you by those paragons of ignorance and bigotry, the Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT). Actually they're calling it Religious Freedom Sunday in Tennessee, but a quick read of the day's manifesto shows it up for the exercise in religious right historical revisionism that it really is. "The importance of this day," writes FACT's David Shelley, "is driven home by just how much we, as Americans, have forgotten about our heritage." Shelley goes on to make the tiresome observation that the phrase "separation of church and state," coined by Thomas Jefferson in an 1802 letter, appears nowhere in America's founding documents. The simpleminded mistake that FACT and other organizations comprising the Jesus-Industrial Complex make is assuming that the absence of the "separation" phrase in the Constitution means that the doctrine of separation has no legal value in our constitutional system.

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