WASHINGTON -- Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said during television interviews on Sunday that he "almost threw up" after reading President John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech on the separation of church and state.
"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," Santorum said on ABC's "This Week." "The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country."
The Practical Buddhist Responds
Is Santorum that clueless, or that cunning? When I first
saw the news report I thought it was a clever spoof from the Onion, but it's
real. To smear a popular dead president is one thing. To twist a central tenet
of the Constitution --that's scary. Santorum followers -- some of whom
have never read the Constitution and who use a distorted religion to
marginalize the different and justify aggression -- will eat it up. They
don't want religion to influence the government, they want their views made law.
Instead of exercising their rights to teach and preach and influence
government, they want to sit back and elect leaders who promise a theocracy.
Name one theocracy, current or past, with a free citizenry.
Faith influences leaders, of course, though perhaps not as much
as they claim. But when organized religion gets in bed with the
government, the results are always bad for both, and throughout history has led
to loss of freedom of religion, every time.
That's why they call it the Bill of Rights. Separation of Church
and State by the "absolute wall" JFK talked about protects our rights
to worship, picket Planned Parenthood, or fight slavery in the name of faith.
The First Amendment makes Rick want to vomit, but it also
protects his right to worship and believe whatever he likes, and and to say
pretty much anything he wants. That should serve as an effective anti-emetic.
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