Well, I do know this much about New England history:* Because of religious prejudice, Christians like Governor William Shirley and Lieutenant Governor (of Nova Scotia) Charles Lawrence planned and carried out a program of ethnic cleansing on another group of Christians, Acadians, using God-fearing Christian troops from Puritan Massachusetts to do so.
* The father of John Hancock, one of our Founding Fathers, supplied the ships used to commit the ethnic cleansing of the Acadians.
* In pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts, Catholics were routinely warned out of Massachuetts towns, if, in fact, any managed to enter them at all.
* In Boston, prior to the Stamp Act Crisis, rioting and huge anti-Catholic demonstrations used to be the norm every Guy Fawkes Day. It was this anti-Catholic passion Samuel Adams used to his advantage to ally the North End gang with the South End gang, and thereby provide the muscle to protest the Stamp Act.
Conservatively speaking, I'd say the anti-Catholic bias of our forefathers is well documented.
Many of the original colonists left to escape anglicanism, not catholicism, and the only reason they did is because the state forced them to be anglican.
That's true if you're talking about New England, but Anglicans most certainly helped to settle the Mid-Atlantic states (as well as Quakers), and there was a sizeable Anglican communitity in Massachusetts three or four generations after the original Puritan generation. Harriet Beecher Snowe's novel Old Town Folks gives an excellent glimpse into the differences and rivalries between Massachuetts Anglicans and "Puritans" in the era immediately after the Revolution.
the forefathers understood that without the Church's moral influence, liberty would be used for immorality and as Adams told us, our government is unsuited for an immoral people.
That's a wonderful sentiment, but again, I ask "which Church?" You blanket some sort of global sentiment by capitalizing the "C" in "church," but gloss over the fact that wars have been fought, and people have died, over the difference between Christian churches and the political alliances made by those churches. Not just Catholic versus Protestant, but Roundhead versus Cavalier.
So while you're advocating your positions on freedom, which are mostly right and I agree with many of them, do us all a favor and comment on how reprehensible many of the said activities we have the freedom to do are. Because if we don't set a moral example in this nation, we're finished.
With freedom comes responsibility---there are no two ways about it. In that, you are exactly correct. But just as rights belong to the individual, and not to the collective, responsibility is something that comes from the individual, and not to the collective. You are not your brother's keeper---such a notion is entirely incongruent with religious tolerance.