Connecticut, Constitution State No longer

Thomas Hooker

The founding of Connecticut, as was the case of the founding of Rhode Island by the redoubtable and indestructible Roger Williams, began as a religious conflict between Thomas Hooker and John Cotton of Massachusetts.

Voting in Massachusetts was limited to freemen, individuals admitted to churches after their religious views and personal histories had been affirmed by the clergy. Hooker and the Reverend Samuel Stone, looking to embrace a wider congregation, and discontented with what they regarded as a too severe limiting of religious suffrage, lit out, as Mark Twain might have said, for the territories. The two men led about a hundred protesters out of Massachusetts and in 1636 founded the Hartford settlement, named after Stone’s birthplace in England, Hertford.

Thus was the Connecticut colony born, the General Court representing Wethersfield, Windsor and Hartford.

Meeting in May, 1638, the Court framed a written constitution, The Fundamental Orders, establishing a government for the commonwealth. It fell to Hooker to preach the opening sermon at the First Church of Harford at the end of May, during which the founder of Connecticut declared “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,” a republican standard upheld -- at the cost of much blood, sweat and tears -- by the signers of the U.S. Constitution, drafted on May 25, 1787, and adopted when the last state, Roger William’s Rhode Island, ratified our form of government on May 29, 1790.

The heirs and assigns of both Hooker and Williams, circa 2020, may have good reason to doubt that the principle enunciated by Hooker is any longer operative. The foundation of political authority these days – owing entirely to the political suppression of rights -- rests entirely in the hands of Governors Ned Lamont of Connecticut and Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island.

When U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker proclaimed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provided a right to freedom FROM religion, his eccentric claim was written off by most people in Connecticut as a purposeful misrepresentation of the First Amendment by a political crank who was having difficulty with prepositions. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment OF religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereoOF; or abridging the freedom OF speech, or OF the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

On the eve of the American Revolution, Ben Franklin warned his countrymen, “We must all hang together or assuredly, we will hang separately.” The same may be said of the clauses of the First Amendment. They hang together, and an attack on one is an attack on all.

In the Coronavirus period, businesses and social organizations – including churches – have been shuttered through gubernatorial edict, and balancing branches of government, the state legislature and counts, have been disconnected from our constitutional nexus. Oddly in Connecticut, every organization in the state has equal rights but, hearkening back to George Orwell, some organizations are more equal than others.

President of Yankee Institute Carol Platt Liebau notes in recent media release: “It is fortunate that the restrictions Gov. Lamont’s Executive Order outlines for Connecticut’s houses of worship are simply recommendations rather than regulations. Otherwise, they would constitute absolutely impermissible burdens on every Connecticut citizen’s First Amendment rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion – our First Freedom. What’s more, even as our state’s businesses are permitted to operate at 50 percent capacity with well over 100 people in grocery and hardware stores, the governor would restrict even mega-churches to 100 people or less, with further restrictions on how American citizens may express their faith within those churches – presuming to regulate even the practice of Christian communion! Like the state’s restrictions on Connecticut’s businesses, these prohibitions have been handed down accompanied by minimal scientific data, and in the complete absence of transparency. The disparate treatment of various businesses and individuals – and now houses of worship – is appalling and unbecoming to those who would lead a free people.”

Spoken, lovers of liberty may agree, like Hooker; or like Franklin who, asked by a woman “What have you given us?” when he emerged from the Constitutional Convention, replied, “A republic madam, if you can keep it”; or like Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense", who reminds us that “character is much easier kept than recovered,” an apothegm that applies equally to people and states.

Now that governors have arrogated to themselves legislative and judicial powers assigned by the US and Connecticut constitutions to courts and legislatures, we may well ask, “Where can republican (small “r”) protestors go to found a new state based on Hooker’s proposition that the foundation of government authority in a true republic is “laid in the free consent of the people?”