‘Thank Jehovah’s Witnesses for Religious Freedom’

“BEFORE you shut the door on a Jehovah’s Witness,” says an article in the newspaper USA Today, “pause to consider the shameful persecution they suffered not too long ago, as well as the rich contribution they have made to the First Amendment freedoms we all enjoy.” Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted in the United States throughout the 1940’s for, among other things, refusing to salute the flag.​—Exodus 20:4, 5.

Some 30 cases involving Jehovah’s Witnesses came before the U.S. Supreme Court in the five-year period between 1938 and 1943. The article says: “So frequently did Witnesses raise core First Amendment issues that Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote, ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses ought to have an endowment in view of the aid which they give in solving the legal problems of civil liberties.’”

Thus, near its conclusion the article states: “All religions have the Jehovah’s Witnesses to thank for the expansion of [religious] freedom.”

[Picture Credit Lines on page 32]

Background, building: Photo by Josh Mathes, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States; lower left, justices: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States