kalamazu

Dear Rhode Island,

I love you. Honestly, I do. But you don’t make it easy.

There are a few things that are permanently connected to Rhode Island for me: Coffee milk, beach traffic, terrible accents, and the separation of church and state.

Seriously. I don’t know if you realize it, but the separation of church and state is a concept invented by Roger Williams, who also happened to found Rhode Island. Furthermore, Williams was thrown out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony specifically for his radical ideas on this exact topic.  He was so strict in his religious beliefs that he ticked off the Separatists who moved to the New World to escape a government whose religion wasn’t strict enough. He was too puritanical for the Puritans.

He thought that the magistrates of the court system should not have the power to punish people for their religious beliefs. He said that only God could judge on that front, and religion needed to be sheltered from the flawed thinking of men.

Of course, John Winthrop and the government at the time knew that the colonists’ fear of God was the best means of controlling them, and Roger Williams’ radical ideas would screw it up for them, so they told him he had to shut his mouth or leave altogether.

He left, and he began the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations on the foundation of a clear separation between church and state.

Even if I disagree with the reasoning behind it, I can’t deny that they had the right idea in 1637.  The fact that this is happening nearly 400 years later is, to be frank, appalling. 

Get your shit together, Rhode Island, and while you’re working on that, how about a little marriage equality? You’re making New England look bad.

Love,

Kally

PS. Tell my mom I’ll be home soon. You know how she worries.