More separation, please

Regarding yesterday's judicial overturn of California's Proposition 8, a facebook friend asks, "Why do religious people refuse to accept the SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE?"

If the separation of church and state is the issue, then let's well and truly separate them.  Let religion keep marriage, which it's had far longer than any state has existed, and let the state keep its laws off our sacraments and come up with its own relationship-defining contracts.

Even Jefferson's wall of separation was formulated in terms of a restriction on the actions of the state.  Nowadays, the restrictions seem to work only in the other direction.  Let religion so much as peek over Jefferson's wall and say something about the state's stuff, and we have screaming, shouting, demonstrations and lawsuits.  Meanwhile, the state is free to come and go as it wishes, plundering and regulating whatever it touches.

The essence of good government

Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, listed the blessings America had received and noted the one other thing necessary to our national happiness:

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.