There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle in religion. Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation.

-James Madison

AMERICA is selling its birthright for a mess of pottage: freedom in exchange for the no-risk "comfort and security" President Obama and his crew of statists are pushing from Washington. And all we have to do is learn to submit to government's embrace. Witness Obamacare.

The multitrillion-dollar Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed two years ago (thanks to some Capitol Hill shenanigans) is due to come under review by the Supreme Court later this month. Better start praying that the men and women in black recognize pottage when it's in front of their noses.

Handing Washington control over health care allows HHS to dictate the terms. Already we can hear the clink of Washington forging Obamacare's restraints on our liberty: the mandate that employers provide contraception coverage in their health insurance packages.

Contraception? No big deal, you say, unless you're a Catholic bishop, in which case celibacy should do the trick. Don't be deceived: The issue isn't contraception, it's about your freedom not to be forced to violate your conscience--and who is ultimately answerable to whom.

When Thomas Jefferson sat down in Fredericksburg in 1777 to pen what we now call the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, he was drawing on 150 years of established tradition and centuries of incestuous church-state unions that ruined both faith and governance. The 102 Pilgrims who boarded the Mayflower in 1620 risked their lives coming to the New World for one reason: freedom to practice their faith.

Sixteen years later, Roger Williams, who had come to disagree with those Puritan leaders, founded Providence, R.I., unlinking church and state for the first time. It was a place where all modes and methods of belief could be practiced--a haven, he said, for those "distressed of conscience."