Constitution does not tout Christianity

In his Dec. 9 letter George Kocan declares that the purpose of marriage is to raise and protect the rights of children, and homosexual couples cannot have children. Therefore, he concludes that homosexuals have no right to redefine marriage in their favor. He states: “I live in an America founded by Christian men who submitted to the authority of the Bible. On the basis of that authority, they devised a Constitution which protects our God-given rights.” There are several misstatements that should be pointed out.

First, the Constitution, which does give us many rights, contains not a single reference to God or Christianity. And we must recognize that many of the founders of our country were Unitarians or deists and not Christians. Thomas Jefferson considered himself a deist, and he did not accept the virgin birth or divinity of Jesus or the resurrection.

Jefferson also wrote in a draft of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” He then sent his draft to Benjamin Franklin, a Unitarian, for review, Franklin took his pen and drew diagonal lines through the words “sacred and undeniable” and substituted “self-evident,” and that's how the Declaration came to read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Finally, we must understand that we were not at all founded as a Christian nation. The best evidence we have of this is the Treaty of Peace negotiated with Tripoli in George Washington's administration, which reads, “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

I would submit that we should maintain a position of neutrality on matters of faith and religion. We were founded as a republic based on the concept of democracy and elected representatives.

Theodore M. Utchen

Wheaton