This is why Westboro Baptist Church is a joke

[kandrathe]

That's simply not true. While discrimination is alive and well in the South (and not just in the South), both the laws and popular opinion are far more liberal than they were in the 1950s, let alone the 1900s or 1850s. Nobody except fringe lunatics are suggesting returning to an era of slavery, or even segregation.

You can argue that the change did not come from the civil war, although I think that's a difficult case to argue. But you can't argue that the change didn't happen, because it obviously did.

I'm not arguing that the change didn't happen. I'm arguing that the war didn't change much due to imposition of Jim Crow laws. Even with federal court decisions, and the use of federal troops people wouldn't be forced into being nice to their fellow citizens. Only when peoples attitudes changed, did the conditions for blacks improve.

They did try that. Anti-slavery advocates had been at work for well over a century by the 1860s. Compromise rather than confrontation was the order of the day throughout the 1850s. But when it became clear that the South could not abide a union that eroded their traditional norms and institutions, that is to say, slavery, they declared independence.

The tide was changing to abolish slavery, and rapidly. Why couldn't the US have its own William Wilberforce? Had the northern abolitionists and the slave owning south had stronger leadership from Lincoln in providing reason and good will towards each other, and had the north been willing to compensate the slave owners for their loses, then the US could have followed Britain's lead with their own peacefully acquired Emancipation Act.

Nobody has ever seriously challenged the right to public prayer. The objections are about state power, not individual rights: one must not invoke religion when cloaked, however loosely, in the mantle of state authority. By conflating the two, you're generating a strawman of intolerant atheists.

See my response to FIT and the case against the National Day of Prayer...