"He argued that governments have no business meddling with the religious beliefs of their citizens; that how people worship and whether they worship should not be regulated by the legal machinery of the state. He also denied the right of his rulers to determine what could be printed and read. He claimed that marriage should be founded on mutual affection and intellectual compatibility and that, when those broke down, divorce should end the misery and permit both parties to attempt other relationships. He thought his rulers should be held to account for their actions and that the law was above them. He also contended the best kind of government was republican, an argument that has often prevailed, though not at present in his native land. Many of the civil rights on which modern democratic states are founded are adumbrated in his work. Revolutionaries in France appropriated Milton to their cause. Similarly, American statesmen such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams drew on their wide reading of Milton both to shape their republicanism and to address specific issues such as British taxation in America (for which Franklin drew a parallel with the Chaos of Paradise Lost), the case for ecclesiastical disestablishment in Virginia (for which Franklin drew on the anti-prelatical tracts) and the wickedness of British rulers (whose arrogance Adams compared to Satan's). In intellectual terms, Milton is one of the founding fathers of America."