Reviewing Religious Liberty and the American Founding, by Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Thomas Kidd writes:

People involved in American political life in the late 1700s disagreed vehemently about the proper approach to church-state separation. But Muñoz shows that there was near-universal agreement among people of widely differing faiths and ideologies on religious liberty as an inalienable natural right. A “natural” right was one not granted by government or by any human authority. Such rights were part of the natural order; they resulted from principles derived from “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence put it. These rights were “inherent” in the sense that they inhered in human nature, and all people rightfully enjoyed them. . . .

In one of his more controversial conclusions, Muñoz insists that there is little evidence that the Founders would have believed that “free exercise” must allow conscience exemptions from otherwise constitutional laws. He puts a great deal of emphasis on the fact that debates over exemptions (or replacements, to be more precise) from militia service for Quakers and other pacifists almost never cited the requirement of protecting free exercise of religion.

This is a worthwhile observation. But I wish that Muñoz had given more space to the Constitution’s own religious “exemption”: that of allowing people to “affirm” rather than swear to support the Constitution. This was an accommodation of Quakers’ scruples and those of anyone who literally applied the Bible’s injunction against swearing oaths. The existence of this alternative for conscience, within the Constitution itself, suggests that the Founders believed the government should not unduly burden or violate people’s religious conscience in crafting civil laws or even in framing the Constitution. Exemptions or alternatives were a familiar option among the Founders as paths to avoid this classic dilemma.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.