Constitution, not religion, under attack - Kit Kincade

[Democrat 4 Ever]

This was printed in today's Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY. There was a long-winded piece by Mitch McConnell that was stunning in its duplicitous tone and light on facts or reason (but hit all the Religious Right's talking points and hysteria). Right under McConnell's scree was this piece by Kit Kincade, a certified financial planner and former chief of the Associated Press Kentucky bureau. It is, also, fairly long but well worth the effort. Kincade effectively shoots down every lame argument a freeper or a neocon can devise to argue for religion in government. He gives a historical perspective as well as a solid argument to dismiss the wacko nutjobs who pass for republicans today. Hope you get a chance to read it...

The religious right is demanding a unique and special privilege in its battle to support President Bush. They want to challenge civil policy from behind the cloak of religious freedom.

The advertising for today's television show at Highview Baptist Church claims that some of the President's judicial nominees are being persecuted for their religious beliefs. It is a clever strategy to advance their cause vigorously, all the while claiming to be the victim of aggression.

Conservative Christians have some very specific ideas on how our civil society should work. Most of us do. Unfortunately, they have developed the hard position that their ideas spring from the sole religious truth and that anyone who disagrees is persecuting them.

Is religion under attack or is the Constitution?

In our age of religious fervor, it is popular to extol the religious faith of our nation's Founding Fathers, but the framers of the Constitution left God out of that document. There is no mention of a deity or a creator, divine providence or anything similar.

In the original document, the framers did write a prohibition of "religious tests" for government office. They had in mind a 1673 law passed by the British Parliament, the Test Act, which said that no person could serve in public office who refused to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, who refused to receive the communion according to the rites of the Church of England, or who refused to renounce belief in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Although directed primarily against Roman Catholics, it also excluded Protestant nonconformists, most of them Puritans, many of whom had already fled to North America.

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050424/OPINION04/504240348/1054/OPINION

[BlueEyedSon]

1. del

[Coastie for Truth]

2. The Constitution Is Clearly Under Attack

The advertising for today's Right Wing Reactionary Pseudo-Religious television show at Highview Baptist Church claims that some of the President's judicial nominees are being persecuted for their religious beliefs. It is a clever strategy to advance their cause vigorously, all the while claiming to be the victim of aggression. They are not the persecutees. They seek to be the persecutors. Period.

Like most people of faith (I regard myself as a person of faith), Conservative Pseudo-Christians have some very specific ideas on how our civil society should work. I do too. Most Americans do. Unfortunately, the Conservative Pseudo-Christians have developed the hard position that their ideas spring from an "exclusivist" sole religious truth and that anyone who disagrees is a Godless atheist bent on persecuting them.

The reactionary Pseudo-Christian heresy tries to position itself as being in the nation's long line of religiously driven reform movements. Wise to the ways of Republican political strategists, however, they also seek the cover of religious freedom. The heretics and blasphemers seek to change civil policies all the while complaining that anyone who opposes them is persecuting them for their religious beliefs. This is a pure wedge issue and a raw try for raw political power and nothing else.

Much in modern medicine offends them -- abortion, birth control, stem-cell research and withdrawing life-support technology from persons near death, to name a few.

Hey dudes, these are all issues of civil public policy, whether or not there may be profound moral or religious reasons for supporting or opposing them.

Very simply - equating "stem cell research" to "abortion" is a stretched, slippery slope, of Scriptural interpretation (or mis-interpretation) by the Pseudo-Christian heretics and blasphemers. My faith permits - and even encourages - "stem cell research" as steps to a life saving measure for lives in being.

Therefore, imposing another faith on me, a faith that has specific doctrines contrary to the specific doctrines of my faith, is a clearly UNconstitutional "law respecting an establishment of religion" and equally clearly denies me my constitutionally protected right of freedom from any laws "prohibiting the free exercise thereof/"

Of course, very illiberally or non-liberally, the ultimate guarantor from a "law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" is in the Second Amendment "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Since I am a diabetic, I do have "a dog in this fight." And since I belong to a minority religion, I have a second "dog in this fight."

[Larkspur]

3. And Democrats need to shout loudly that the Religious Right and their

Repuke toadies are persecuting those who defend the US Constitution.