Poetry

be delivered on Sundays. The more radical movement for separation came late in the 19th century with the National Liberal League, which aimed at nothing less than the obliteration of religion from public life. In their own alternative to the Blaine Amendment, the Liberals sought to ban, from all levels of government, any aid, direct or indirect, to religious institutions or teachings.

But to grasp the sweep of the separationist program was to grasp at once how unreceptive the mass of Americans were to any such program. In the sweep of their opposition to all things religious, the Liberals swept as well to the rejection of all things moral. The same people who found their enemy in the religious tradition would see the same enemy at work in the laws that regulated the “vices” and obscene publications. The truly emancipated would move first to the “freedom of sexual discussion,” then to sexual freedom itself; and in that move they would expose the libertinism that truly lay at their core. Not for nothing did some of their former allies brand them “the party of license,” and with that split they came apart as a political force.

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be delivered on Sundays. The more radical movement for separation came late in the 19th century with the National Liberal League, which aimed at nothing less than the obliteration of religion from public life. In their own alternative to the Blaine Amendment, the Liberals sought to ban, from all levels of government, any aid, direct or indirect, to religious institutions or teachings.

But to grasp the sweep of the separationist program was to grasp at once how unreceptive the mass of Americans were to any such program. In the sweep of their opposition to all things religious, the Liberals swept as well to the rejection of all things moral. The same people who found their enemy in the religious tradition would see the same enemy at work in the laws that regulated the “vices” and obscene publications. The truly emancipated would move first to the “freedom of sexual discussion,” then to sexual freedom itself; and in that move they would expose the libertinism that truly lay at their core. Not for nothing did some of their former allies brand them “the party of license,” and with that split they came apart as a political force.