History lesson time!

 And, yeah, OK, I already hear y'all moaning and complaining.

Aw, dummy up. Sometimes the history nerd in me pushes aside the Sportsball World nerd in me, and if you don't know that by now you haven't been paying attention. ("I'm sorry, were you saying something?" you're saying). Sometimes History Nerd just can't hold his tongue, and this is one of those times.

That's because Indiana's reactionary attorney general, Performance Art Todd Rokita, revealed yesterday that whatever his educational background, it didn't include American history.

Performance Art Todd was banging the drums for the latest installment of the Parents' Bill of Rights, in which he explains what rights parents have regarding their children's "religious freedom." That kids already are guaranteed that freedom by the Constitution, and can already do everything he spelled out (and that the Parents' Bill of Rights spells out) didn't deter him in the slightest. 

There's nothing guys like Performance Art Todd like better than addressing phantom issues, after all. It's damn near a cottage industry for them.

Anyway, in the midst of Performing his Art, yesterday, Todd-o dropped a doozy of a fiction: That the separation of church and state was never a thing until a handful of court cases a few years back, and that it is, in fact, a "myth."

Uh, not so much.

The founders addressed the issue way back at the beginning of the republic, and the seeds of church-state separation actually go back farther than that. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson espoused the principle long before the Constitution was ever put to paper, and the rest of the founders followed suit with the establishment clause in the First Amendment. That clause is entirely based on the separation idea, and the belief (as set forth by Jefferson and Madison) that separation was not only wise but necessary to both religious freedom and the republic's survival as a republic.

Jefferson and Madison, meanwhile, never shut up about it. 

While president in 1802, Jefferson first used the term "wall of separation" so widely quoted by defenders of the establishment clause to this day. Madison, meanwhile, never deviated from his position on the matter, publicly or otherwise.

All of this happened, it goes without saying, quite a few years before those court cases Performance Art Todd cited in trying to claim church-state separation was a "myth."

As usual, he had it backward.

He was the one doing the mythologizing.