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Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's views on freedom of religion and freedom of the press reflect those of a well-thought out balanced approach to public policy. This balance encompassed differences in personal opinion including his own beliefs as well as the pros and cons of granting these freedoms as illustrated in this paper.
With regards to freedom of religion, Jefferson's own roots in Deism that espouses the belief in a creator manifests itself throughout The Declaration of Independence when he uses terms such as "Creator," "Nature's God," and "Divine Providence." Further, Jefferson believed that people obtained rights such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" from this Creator. Even so, Jefferson was a strong ally of religious freedom, commenting that, "The constitutional freedom of religion [is] the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights." Reflecting his support for the separation of church and state, Jefferson wrote, "Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle."
Jefferson was concerned with the abuses of the press as evidenced by the following quote:
The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper."
But, these concerns were not enough to outweigh what Jefferson considered to be the necessity for freedom of the press, "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure."
Bibliography
Thomas Jefferson." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_JeffersonAvailable 25 Oct. 2005.
Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government, Freedom of Religion http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1650.htm. Available 25 Oct. 2005.
Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government, Freedom of the Press. http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1600.htm. Available 25 Oct. 2005.
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