Word: jefferson
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...fractious globe allows it, Ronald Reagan may spend his final months in power less as a swashbuckler than as a teacher, looking back and extracting lessons from his considerable experience. His "Economic Bill of Rights" speech, delivered on the third of July at the Jefferson Memorial, was a summary of the passions expended in his stewardship and a call to the faithful to carry the banner beyond...
From his years as a dinner speaker for General Electric, Reagan has been a master of the art of exhortation. Indeed, the day before he journeyed to the Tidal Basin to stand beneath the bronze statue of Jefferson, the President told his Cabinet, "The mashed-potato circuit is still out there, and I may be right back on it." So why not start now, while he still commands the world's airwaves and has his jet to get him around...
Reagan's pilgrimage to the feet of Jefferson was a bit of a sacrilege. Jefferson hated political speeches. He also thought it was unwise to hang around the swamps of Washington in the summer. Despite criticism, the Virginian paid long visits to Monticello, where both air and mind were clearer. Yet there is a resonance now between Jefferson's warnings and Reagan's present-day fears of a Government so big and costly that it ultimately breaks America's spirit...
...opposite side stand "separationists," who adhere to Thomas Jefferson's famous metaphor that the Constitution built a "wall of separation between church and state" and who embrace most of the Supreme Court's establishment rulings. Exponents include many Jewish lobbies and the National Council of Churches. The 14.6 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest Protestant body, deeply split on the issue, is represented in Washington by the proseparation Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. Its leader, the Rev. James Dunn, says true faith is cheapened by "proclamation of God as the national mascot...
...Potter Stewart, for example, contended that in 1789-91 Congress and those states that ratified the Bill of Rights intended merely to prevent the establishment of a single national religion and keep the Federal Government from interfering with the established churches in various states. Accommodationists delight in noting that Jefferson allowed the Bible and a hymnal to be used to teach reading when he headed the District of Columbia school board, and that he signed a treaty in which the U.S. Government paid a Catholic missionary's salary and built churches for Indians. James Madison, who drafted the religion clauses...