Oops, sorry!
Freedom of religion is covered under the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, written and adopted in 1787. Freedom of religion is not part of the Declaration Of Independence. My bad.
After some thought, my answer is;
Whenever and wherever there is a sense of superiority, a sense of egotism, bigotry, fear of the unknown, and yes, braggarts who speak of more than they know or lie to scare or improve their status and let us not forget bullies and lastly, class separation in all its ugly forms, there will always be persecution, and "scape-goating," "fall-guy," "whipping boy" all these meaning to mislead blame on a person so that the real culprit can stay clean of any trouble or worry. All people that feel superior do this to the innocent and defensless. All these terms are a form of hate and yes fear of the unknown. Better to blame the one nobody knows than to BE blamed as the loser. Does this have a tone of racism? It should, this comes from the same kind of inane thinking.
As long as there are terms like the above around there will always be "Are we persecuted by some specific conservatory movement?" And the ones that I have noticed persecuting in civil but with anger underneath between the lines in article essays, are Pastors. These people are Baptists, (of course the Roman Catholics have done this too, in Europe), Christian Zealots (like the ones from Massachusetts that burned witches), which are a Christian branch which proliferated because of Freedom Of Religion and yet, they have little religious tolerance, which is a basis for Freedom Of Religion for something that is different from them. This is a pretense of virtue or, hypocrisy. People shouldn't throw stones when they have glass houses.
You know, in my humble comparison; Jesus Christ's major messages (Teachings, lectures to the people) were about Love and Compassion, and the Wiccan Rede states "an it harm none, do what thy will."
Seems to me it's the same difference; Love, an it harm none. I see them as similar statements for civilizing humanity.
Whatever, dude. That's my .02c worth of comment from the peanut gallery section.
I think we are, atleast to a point. Witch burnings predate the famous Witch Trials in Europe and to this day there is anti-witch type behaviour. I have seen a woman on TV who was (or at the very least thought) that she was fired from her job because her boss found a pagan newsletter that belonged to her somewhere and in my homestate, on the news one night, they did a story on the local pagans or witched or whatever and they showed a bit of them doing some kind of ceremony in the desert and everyone was wearing a robe with the hoods down. At some point one of the attendees said that normally they did not wear the robes and hoods, but some or many, if not all of them wanted to sheild their faces from view for fear of losing their jobs.
And in Kenya, witch burnings still take place (although usually it's just jelous family members accussing a relative or witchcraft so they can get their stuff...although for that to work it would still have to be an offence and punishable by death) and in....I forget if it was Iran or some place else in the Middle East...there was some phsyic from another country that came there and made an appearance on TV and then the authorities arrested him and were going to (don't know if they have) excecute him for "sorcery".
There may not be a collective movement against magickal practitioners, but I think there is, atleast, still opposition.
