I write on church-state issues a lot, and it always comes down to this -- people who conflate the issue of public/individual religious freedom with government/unconstitutional religious neutrality are wilfully ignorant. Some of them may be stupid, sure, but the vast majority of them use this rhetorical ploy the same way all con artists do -- for their emotive/manipulative power.People can and do engage in public religious expression every minute of every day in this country, including on government property. I have personally attended an "America for Jesus" rally at which Falwell himself spoke held in a public park, on government property. No one tried to stop him from doing so; the permit for the rally was issued without regard to the religious nature of the expression. And similar events take place every day in parks and on courthouse grounds and public property all over the country.
And demagogues like Falwell are constantly conflating public expressions of religion with government expressions of religion. They also get enormous mileage out of conflating belief in God with opposition to separation of church and state.
It angers and saddens everyone to think of some poor humble patriotic Americans, bowing their heads, and being told they can't do that. And so, even though this never happens, this is the imagery that the religious right and other liars and frauds use. Even though it is all about government-led and government-sponsored prayer, we hear these blowhards diatribe endlessly about how God was removed from schools! Really? Interesting, because I thought that God was everywhere, that your relationship to God is internal, and that the state was simply disallowed from leading and sponsoring prayers, not that the students aren't free to individually decide to pray.
So is your god so weak and pitiful that he needs to be regulated and prescribed by the government? An interesting admission. And the same logic applies to those who think that ten commandments (and other) monuments = god ... and thus when monuments aren't planted on all government courtyards, then god must be dead!
What a pathetic and small god that must be, to need propping up by the state -- as Franklin once wrote,
"When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."Amen to that.
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Technorati tags: Religion, Church-state
