Happy Freethought Day

In case you didn’t know, today is Freethought Day. What is Freethought Day? Glad you asked. It’s the celebration of the day the Salem Witch Trials ended. This was the day, way back in 1692, when the governor of Massachusetts decided that spectral evidence would no longer permissible in a court of law. He apparently had friends who had been accused who he knew weren’t witches, but realized that the reality they weren’t witches wouldn’t matter to the courts. So he declared that from that day forward, if you were going to convict someone of being a witch, you had to provide actual proof that they were indeed a witch. We celebrate this day as Freethought Day because this was the day that sanity was restored, literally, during a witch-hunt. And for the record, I’m not a witch, I’m not a witch!