Keeping Church and State Separate

Every time Barack Obama tries to inject his campaign and now incoming administration with evidence of his Christianity, he blunders. First, it was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his often incendiary rhetoric, a story broken by ABC News in March, 2008. Those videos distributed on YouTube.com thrust the issue of race front and center, and led to Obama's insightful and calming Philadelphia speech on race. It also led Hillary Clinton to affect a twang and insinuate that she was the candidate of white America. We know how that ended.

Now Obama has made the strange decision to ask Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, to give the invocation at his inauguration despite Warren's rather public and condemning stand on homosexuality. And just at the time when Proposition 8 is dividing California and the country, and the bioflick "Milk" is reminding us that twenty years ago a bunch of homophobic idiots tried to remove homosexuals from the teaching profession.

The Obama controversy led Warren to remove from the Saddleback Church's website the language previously noted that said that homosexuals could not be members of the Saddleback Church. That could be perceived as a good thing, a gesture of conciliation, perhaps.

NO! Watch Rachel Maddow take us through the timeline of the controversy to Rick Warren's December 22nd posting on the Saddleback website of his "unscripted" and "untruthful" retelling of his views on homosexuality. His latest meandering discussion is frankly disturbing and disingenuous. Listen to his December 22, 2008 News & Views post, if you dare.

Or read through Frank Rich's column today in the New York Times on Obama's decision to ask Rick Warren to perform such a prominent role in the inauguration.

Which leads me to conclude that this pandering to the religious elements of the American electorate must stop. The Heritage Foundation has been trying to rewrite American history with revisionist analysis that "proves" the Founding Fathers were indeed Christians, yes, and intended to keep religion in American government. NO! There is a reason why we need to keep the two separate, and that was why there is a First Amendment that contains not one, but two limitations on government and religion: the establishment and the free exercise clauses. The document, not a sacred document, but a foundation of our government, doesn't use Christian language, but uses secular language to establish the strcutre of America.

So after watching eight years when global warming, science, evolution, birth control, environmental protection, to name just the obvious, were disregarded, distorted, and denied, isn't it time to recognize that using religion as a justification for these delusional views was an insane tactic and one that might lead to the destruction of the planet?

All the while, of course, that sin of Christianity--greed--was allowed to fester as evidence of the vitality of the free market system.