Women Should be Able to Make Choices Because They too Have a Conscience

So, apparently the idea of women's rights and the idea that women are human beings and thus are equal to men shares an interesting history with the concept, beleaguered as of late, of the Separation of Church and State. Via Talk to Action:

In 1636, when Roger Williams founded Providence Plantations (now Rhode Island) he created the first purely civil state formed by social contract. It granted religious liberty to every inhabitant, guaranteed that no one "should be molested for his conscience," and ascribed power to the magistrate "only in civil things."

The first case to test Williams' new principle of civil government came in the spring of 1638 when Joshua Verin was disenfranchised at a town meeting "for restraining of liberty of conscience." Williams and others had organized the first Baptist church in America. Attendance at its services was entirely voluntary. Joshua Verin didn't care to attend the settlement's church services. His wife did. She exercised her liberty to attend a preaching service without his permission and, according to town records, "He hath trodden her underfoot tyrannically and brutally . . . with his furious blows she went in danger of her life...."

William Arnold, one of Verin's defenders, is reported to have said "when he consented to that order [liberty of conscience] he never intended that it should extend to the breach of any ordinance of God, such as the subjection of wives to their husbands."

That last bit sounds a lot like something you might hear coming from some leaders of the Religious Right these day. Coincidence?