Dare To Question Elizabeth Cady Stanton This speech, given before a Liberal League, probably in the late 1870's, is transcribed from one of Stanton's handwritten manuscripts, untitled and undated, in her Library of Congress papers. It gives a flavor of Stanton's stalwart support of the separation of church and state and her views on religion's harm to women and society. -- Dan Barker
Though we have passed beyond the Inquisition, the stake, the rack and the thumb screw, yet those who dare publicly question the popular theology, are as effectually persecuted today, as ever. Though in different ways, from the coarse, brutal modes of the past, we have more refined methods of torturing the spirit rather than the flesh. Go into any community, and if there is a person or family who does not belong to some one of the leading sects, who expresses doubts as to the truth of any of the dogmas, traditions, and superstitions of the popular theology and you will invariably find such a person or family, ignored, ostracized, slandered, unless by great wealth, and genius they conquer by power, the positions denied them by right. Hence Liberal Leagues are needed to make all forms of religion, all shades of thought equally respectable. We occasionally hear, even in our country at this late day, of physical inflictions for opinion's sake, as the recent case in Texas proves. It was stated in the leading Journals that a respectable physician who was supposed to entertain liberal theological opinions, was taken from his home, severely beaten, tarred and feathered: -- the assailants declaring that all infidels in that state should be similarly dressed and treated. When Col. Robert Ingersoll lectured in the chief cities of New York last winter, the press, the pulpit at once put him in the pillory of abuse and denunciation. Bishop Doane of Albany wrote a protest against him as a dangerous man unfit to be heard! and tried to secure the signatures of all the leading clergy. None declined. The people crowded to hear him, were enchained with his eloquence and in spite of Bishop Doane's protest [Ingersoll] was invited there a second time. The clergy throughout the state attacked him fiercely, and treated him with as much arrogance as if the constitution of the United States had not said in its first amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion; or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech." The question naturally arises, shall the clergy in this land be permitted to do by clamor, what Congress is forbidden to do by law? It may be a small matter to denounce one man in every pulpit from Maine to Texas, but if the principle of free speech and free thought be questioned and religious persecution tolerated, we have rung the death knell of American liberties. We cannot watch with too jealous an eye the slightest aggression on individual rights by the church, remembering that the moral wrongs, oppressions and persecutions inflicted on humanity through the centuries have all been in the name of religion. . . . The preference is invariably given to those who sustain the popular faith. With all his resources in himself, he [the freethinker] is often made to feel painfully conscious of his isolation from human sympathy. One of the most touching chapters in the Autobiography of Theodore Parker is that in which he describes his sense of loneliness. While conscious of his own unflinching integrity to principle, his lofty 1