My point is that you pretended like America was founded on religious freedom when it very demonstrably was not. Not according to The History Channel and not according to the history books. We were talking about rhetoric vs. actual practice. The Bill of Rights is rhetoric - Jefferson no more believed in actual equality than any other landed white man of his time. He owned slaves and most certainly did not see women as his equals. He kept his favorite slave Sally in a small room with a dirt floor just off his bedroom so that he could easily rape her at will.
Edit: Whether or not Jefferson truly believed in religious freedom and it seems like he did, it was not exactly a popular or widely held belief in the early years of the Republic (which is what I said in my initial comment). That is the point.
