How one Englishman protested discrimination three hundred years ago.

In 1703, a writer and troublemaker named Daniel Defoe, seeking to show the absurdity of a bill forbidding non-Anglicans to hold public office, suggested in a widely-published pamphlet (The Shortest Way With Dissenters, 1703) that barring the scoundrels from office was a big waste of time, and that it would be much more efficient to simply execute them:

It is cruelty to kill a snake or a toad in cold blood, but the poison of their nature makes it a charity to our neighbours, to destroy those creatures! not for any personal injury received, but for prevention; not for the evil they have done, but the evil they may do!.... How many millions of future souls, (shall) we save from infection and delusion, if the present race of Poisoned Spirits were purged from the face of the land!... The light foolish handling of them by mulcts, fines, etc.; 'tis their glory and their advantage! If the Gallows instead of the Counter, and the galleys instead of the fine were the reward of going to (non-Anglican churches), there would not be so many... Let Us Crucify The Thieves! As Scipio said of Carthage, Delenda est Carthago! (“Carthage must be deleted.” Defoe was no scholar: it was Cato who pronounced Troy deletable (though Scipio who did the deleting).)

Defoe, to his shock, found his histrionic, inaccurate, and profoundly ridiculous words taken seriously. A large number of radical Anglicans, thinking one of them had authored the screed, came out loudly in favor of execution; this solution, after all, was quite clearly consistent with the widely accepted theory that only Anglicans had any virtue, and that all others were “poison” in the body politic. (We can see many similar ideas in circulation today, though usually not so well elaborated.)

When the Anglicans realized that Defoe’s pamphlet was intended as satire, they threw Defoe into Newgate prison for "seditious libel." He was sentenced to spend three days in the pillory, a device that would make him defenseless against any treatment the crowd wished to subject him to. Defoe’s "Hymn To The Pillory," a scathing satire of the Anglicans who had put him in prison, was smuggled out in time for his punishment, and the crowd enjoyed it so much, and so admired Defoe for his defiance, that they covered Defoe’s pillory with flowers.