The Civil War, like most wars, was a bad time for religious skeptics. - Susan Jacoby

For the past four decades, the militant religious right has mounted a tireless assault on separation of church and state.

However, bread-and-butter feminism was not so fundamentally threatening as to arouse the full ire of the religious right. It took the legalization of abortion, with its negation of sacred rationales for strict social control of women’s childbearing decisions, to join the battle between conservative religion and secularist feminism.

Dictatorial regimes recognized evidence-based freethought as an enemy.