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To paraphrase Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot, “Americans will never be free until the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last preacher.”
Enough! Get these preachers out of the public square! This is America, we are a nation of laws and our laws are deliberately founded on an explicitly ‘Godless Constitution” and not the blood-soaked book of a Bronze Age nomadic tribe. No where does Barack Obama cite to the Constitution’s explicit requirement that there shall be “no religious test” to hold public office in the United States. No where do any journalists point to John Adams’ senate-ratified, congressionally endorsed, United States Treaty with Tripoli in which it is explicitly stated that the United States of America is in “no way a Christian nation.”
What is this “Jesus died for our sins” rubbish doing in the public discourse and in the public square? But since they brought it up, because Jesus (no credible evidence this guy ever existed) rose from the dead to live for eternity he didn’t really die for our sins after all did he? Neat trick! But if these preachers want to march out politicians to publically confess their sins (after much PR mulcting and mincing of scripted words) they should begin with HYPOCRISY (the most common character flaw of American Christians) and proceed on to other deadly sins such as Pride and Gluttony. Nowhere do we see Jesus’ gentle humility but just the arrogance of faith and the prideful gluttony of politicians who sop at the corporate and fundamentalist troughs. If he were here I have no doubt he’d pick up his infamous whip, overturn their tables and drive all these merchants of prejudice out of America’s secular temple.
Shame shame on all Americans who denigrate thoroughly decent Muslim-Americans as if it should be a badge of invidious infamy for an American to be a Muslim. Are we now an official nation of self-righteous bigoted hypocrites?
Freedom of religion also means freedom FROM religion. Separation of church and state is first in the Bill of Rights, first in the Constitution, and first in the First Amendment because it was first, and foremost, in the minds of the Founding Fathers. Patriots? Patriots?! Pulease. Do words have any meaning? Amidst all is spin and Orwellian doublespeak we babble like Babitts and communication is little more than revelation of petty prejudices. When politicians like Obama play the religion card and deal it from the bottom of the deck, when they use the “God Strategy” as an invidious excuse to deny ‘fundamental’ civil rights, they are not patriots but hypocrites who betray America’s most fundamental core values.
When religious tolerance has become so perverted that a so called ‘liberal civil rights lawyer’ can actually propose denying civil rights purely for reasons of religion and actually get away with it without even a bubble of protest then, to paraphrase the late U. S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 'The wall which the law professes to erect between Church and State has become even more warped and twisted than I expected'
"If a civil rights lawyer walked into court and argued that fundamental civil rights should be denied solely for metaphysical reasons [religion] one could fairly wonder if he were a charlatan who found his law degree in a box of Cracker Jack. Legally, Obama's position on civil marriage is intellectual rubbish. Audacity indeed!" (Click on Arouete.)
I do not mean to be disrespectful but, with ALL due respect, neither civility nor humanity mandate respect for any religious belief or dogma that denies the equal human dignity, ‘due process,’ and ‘equal protection’ under the law for all persons. Sorry, no deal senator. No deal. Include me out. No one has a right to demand that civilized people endorse such invidious and hateful dogma.
In contravention of the Synod of his own Christian denomination, Barack Obama a so-called ‘civil rights lawyer,’ like too many so-called ‘Christians’, would deny entire class of his fellow-Americans the ‘fundamental’ civil right of SECULAR marriage and he does this for no other reason religion. Since every one admits this right is so ‘fundamental to an ordered society’ I find it incomprehensible that any parent could be so cruel, so heartless, so devoid of compassion, and do disdainful of the human dignity of their own children that they would deny them what they know is most important in the hearts and minds of America: marriage. Oh yes, we know the devotion of these ‘Christians: "Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the stones" (Psalm 137:9.)
"[W]hen politicians ostentatiously proclaim their "deep faith" and march their preachers into the public square promulgating religion as their sole excuse for denying civil rights, then we should, in the spirit of Voltaire, have but one response: Ecrasez l'infame!!
