"For if freethinkers did not have a political platform, they nevertheless agreed on a wide range of social, cultural, and artistic concerns, which generated such fierce debate in the decades after the Civil War that they would form a template for the nation’s “culture wars” a century later. These included free political speech; freedom of artistic expression; expanded legal and economic rights for women that went well beyond the narrow political goal of suffrage; the necessity of ending domestic violence against women and children; dissemination of birth control information (a major target of the punitive postal laws, defining birth control information as obscene, that bore the name of Anthony Comstock); opposition to capital punishment and to inhumane conditions in prisons and insane asylums; and, above all, the expansion of public education."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Atheists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesHumanists
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 6, “The Great Agnostic and the Golden Age of Freethought” (p. 154)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Susan_Jacoby
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Susan Jacoby
33 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Susan Jacoby →
Related Quotes
"What the many types of freethinkers shared, regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity,…"
"Notions of the depravity of human reason, Allen argued, were cherished by priests because, if ordinary human beings w…"
"The twenties also marked the end of the freethought movement as a distinct intellectual force in American life….Freet…"
"Dictatorial regimes recognized evidence-based freethought as an enemy."
"The Constitution is a secularist document because of what it says and what it does not say. The first of the explicit…"
"The second explicit secularist constitutional provision is of course the First Amendment to the bill of rights."
"Without downgrading the importance of either the establishment clause or the constitutional ban on religious tests fo…"
"Although there were numerous attempts by state ratifying conventions to amend the Constitution, and subvert the inten…"
"Throughout their presidencies, Jefferson and his successor, Madison, never ceased to uphold the separation of church …"
"As always, war had lowered the level of American tolerance for any kind of dissent."