Throughout their presidencies, Jefferson and his successor, Madison, never ceased to uphold the separation of church and state they had conceived as … - Susan Jacoby

The conservatives’ accusation was quite accurate: to say that a woman’s voice should count equally with a man’s in public decisions was to assault centuries of theological teachings and social assumptions about the innate inferiority of women.

The attack on science is a prime secularist issue not because religion and science are incompatible but because particular forms of religious belief—those that claim to have found the one true answer to the origins and ultimate purpose of human life—are incompatible not only with science but with democracy.

Free public education for the many rather than the few was essential to the secularist vision of a society in which every individual, unhampered by gatekeepers who sought to control the spread of dangerous knowledge, could go as far as his or her intellect would permit. In the view of freethinkers, the most pernicious gatekeepers were religious authorities; thus, education must be both secular and publicly financed.