If you can pay the price you can buy almost anything you want in this country -- car, home, toothpaste, clothes, food or a charcoal grill. If you can pay the price you can buy services such as sex and votes. It doesn't matter if you don't know your history or your Constitution but it matters how hard you can thump the good book.
Liam Fox sets out to prove this on News Junkie Post.
Religions demand tolerance and acceptance of their own views, practices, prescriptions and prohibitions, when all they offer to others is intolerance. Religions requiring that others be forced, or coerced, to adhere to their tenets are nothing more than fascist political systems, and belief systems that regard their doctrine as being above a democratically elected legislature are seditious.
The founding fathers engineered the separation of church and state to protect America from Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, Islam and all other politically insistent theologies while simultaneously protecting those and all other religions from the interference of government.
In the desperate political climate that they find themselves in, Politicians lacking a clear understanding of or commitment to the First Amendment line up in favor of sectarian measures in the hope of garnering votes and winning elections. . . . Politicians can knowingly violate the constitution secure in the knowledge that the support for their unconstitutional decisions will be provided by those that they have benefited.
TED POE, TEXAS REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN: His
web page is headlined "National Day of Prayer is constitutional whether federal judges like it or not."
Displaying monumental ignorance, he goes on to say, ". . .James Madison knew more about the First Amendment than anybody else since he was the author; yet, in 1813, President Madison proclaimed a National Day of Prayer. . . ."
Wrong. Liam Fox writes: "In 1789, James Madison proposed twelve amendments that ultimately became the ten amendments. In this respect, Madison was the person who wrote the First Amendment, but he wasn’t the one who initially came up with the idea. In fact, there are several factors that qualify the claim that he is the sole author." See here
Although President Madison did issued prayer proclamations during the war of 1812, at the behest of congress, he later expressed regret for these actions. In an undated essay believed to have been written in the year 1817, referred to as ‘The Unattached Memoranda‘, Madison discusses the issue in detail providing five particular reasons for disagreeing with his prior actions of proclaiming a National Day of Prayer and espousing some insight that we would be wise to heed today. See here.
BRADLEY BYRNE, ALABAMA REPUBLICAN GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: He was attacked by the True Political Action Committee "for his previous support of teaching of evolution in public schools and reportedly having the gall to suggest that the Christian bible may not be entirely true."
In a switch reminiscent of John McCain, Byrne became a Born Again Christian and wrote on his
website:
“I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true. From the earliest parts of this campaign, a paraphrased and incomplete parsing of my words have been knowingly used to insinuate that I believe something different than that. My faith is at the center of my life and my belief in Jesus Christ as my personal savior and Lord guides my every action."
SARAH PALIN (no introduction necessary): In a Fox News interview with Bill O'Reilly Palin with all blinking eyed ga-ga smiling sincerity declared:
“I have said all along that America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs and, you know, nobody has to believe me though. You can just go to our Founding Fathers’ early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives. And our Constitution, of course, essentially acknowledging that our unalienable rights don’t come from man; they come from God. So this document is set up to protect us from a government that would ever infringe upon our rights to have freedom of religion and to be able to express our faith freely.”
Someone at Fox, if they even know it, should explain to the Palin that neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence mentions a particular religion, Jesus, the Bible or God. The Constitution does mention a "Nature's God" a few times but not Christianity or Judaism.
The principle misunderstanding of Mrs. Palin’s, is that her interpretation of “our rights to have freedom of religion” translates in her mind, as it does in the minds of most fundamentalist evangelicals, to ‘the right of Christians to impose their beliefs and practices on American law, politics, society and education.’
STEVE PEARCE, NEW MEXICO REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE, states on his website that one of his political goals, and a promise to voters, is that he will "protect our right to prayer and against the government halting expressions of faith."
It is due to the fact that America is a secular nation that no ones religious freedom is threatened. No ones religious freedom is threatened because America has a constitution that charges it’s government to remain neutral and to not get involved in religion or make any law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The only threat to the religious freedoms of all Americans comes from religious organizations and their inability to accept a non-theocratic secular government.
Freedom of religion is not the freedom to impose ones religion on others and the First Amendment is not the property of politicians to trade off for votes. Politicians desperate for votes need to get a platform and leave the constitution, and the American people’s freedom of religion, alone.
