Democracy: a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
The original thirteen colonies became a nation of states in 1776, a constitutional republic, a nation of laws, with our Constitution the bedrock of those laws. The amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, written by James Madison, were proposed in 1789, ten were ratified by the required three fourths of the states in 1791. Those amendments became part of our Constitution.
Our Constitution requires oaths of office to defend and protect our Constitution and the rights it’s supposed to protect against “foreign and domestic“ enemies. States have similar required oaths.
Many of the founding fathers were Christian deists, believing that God created the universe, left it to “natural laws” and gave man free will.
Many settlers fled religious persecution in Europe. Millions of people were killed during the Inquisition and Thirty Years Wars. England had religious tests for office targeting Catholics. Catholics were not tolerated in most of the colonies, in some they were banned from office. Anti-immigration movements in the late 1800s and early 1900s opposed Catholic immigrants.
There were two wealthy Catholic cousins who supported the Revolution. The most prominent was Charles Carroll, who was one of the signatories to the Constitution. At least one historian credited him with the “no religious test” clause. He became a senator from Maryland.
The Constitution says nothing about voting rights, that was left to the states. Voting rights by the states were generally limited to property owning and/or tax paying males.
From History.com: “With passage of a new Reconstruction Act (again over Johnson’s veto) in March 1867, the era of Radical, or Congressional, Reconstruction, began. Over the next decade, Black Americans voted in huge numbers across the South, electing a total of 22 Black men to serve in the U.S. Congress (two in the Senate) and helping to elect Johnson’s Republican successor, Ulysses S. Grant, in 1868.
The 14th Amendment, approved by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all persons “born or naturalized in the United States,” including former slaves, and guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens. In 1870, Congress passed the last of the three so-called Reconstruction Amendments, the 15th Amendment, which stated that voting rights could not be “denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Reconstruction saw biracial democracy exist in the South for the first time, though much of the power in state governments remained in white hands. Like Black voters, Black officials faced the constant threat of intimidation and violence, often at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan or other white supremacist groups.”
The organized women’s suffrage movement began in the 1840s. The 19th Amendment was finally ratified on August 18, 1920.
Voting by black Americans, Native Americans and other minorities wasn’t guaranteed until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
The American Legislative Exchange Council was created in 1973, co-founded by Paul Weyrich, who also co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell and the Heritage Foundation, “I don’t want everybody to vote.”
ALEC was and still is mostly funded by corporate interests. Tobacco companies were among the first. They write legislation, it’s passed out to and lobbied for by their State Policy Network affiliates. That includes voter suppression legislation targeting black Americans, Native Americans, and in some cases women.
Republicans claim that their intentional voter suppression is necessary to prevent voter fraud. That’s a lie, and they’ve failed to prove any of the lies. There have been some instances of voter fraud, some caught by voter registration records.
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