Kirk Cameron, who compared the backlash to the anti-gay statements he made on Piers Morgan Tonight to the persecution of Puritans in England and being “drug out to the public square and stoned so to speak,” told Liberty University students last week that “blasphemy laws are still alive and well in America” and that his critics tried to “crucify me” because he had “blasphemed the God of Political Correctness.” He said conservative Christians shouldn’t be “wussing out” when confronted by questions about homosexuality and should deliver a message of “truth in love” in order to “see people in a right relationship with God, helped and healed and whole.”

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Later in his speech, Cameron promoted his movie about the Puritans who settled in Massachusetts Bay and claimed they supported “limiting the powers of government” and “religious and political freedom, freedom of speech.” Unfortunately for the students at Liberty University, founded as Liberty Baptist College, they didn’t learn that under the Colony’s law those who “openly condemne or oppose the baptizing of infants,” and a central doctrine of the Baptists is the rejection of infant baptism, “shall be sentenced to banishment.”

So while Cameron holds the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a model for the contemporary U.S., the colony’s Puritan government held that “Idolatry, blasphemy, heresy . . . are to be restrained and punished by the civil authority.”