Political Words Of The Day

Oh my God.

So I try to read CNN.com every day, since CNN on TV just grates on me. The article that captures my attention first: Rep. Harris: Church-state seperation 'a lie.'

So after I cleaned up my brain from the wall, I looked at the details, and looked up the original article. I won't lie, my eyes burned from the initial homepage, not to mention the article that followed. Katherine "Hanging Chad" Harris, currently running for a US Senate seat in Florida, gave an interview to the Florida Baptist Witness (don't even get me started on THAT). In this very creepy interview, Harris said, among other things, that the separation of church and state (you know, from the Constitution) is a lie, and that our founding fathers didn't intend for "seperation of church and state" to mean that at all.

Before I get into the acutal policy issues, let me just say that as a Christian (yes, I am), this article was pretty offensive. Those of us not trumpeting the glory and righteousness of almighty God and his Son are apparently slacking the fuck off.

Of the approximately 837 offensive things about this...oh God, it's making my head hurt. First off, how can the sepearation of church and state be a lie? Granted, the phrase itself doesn't appear in the Constitution, but it does exist. First, in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: Congress cannot make any laws pertaining to religion. Simple enough. Later, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment bound the Establishment Clause and other parts of the Bill of Rights to state and local governments. (Quick thank you to my Judicial Politics professor Greg Young, who made his class so interesting to me that I actually remembered most of that without having to dig up my notes.) So there you go. The state (i.e. Congress, or any legislative body) must be separated from (i.e. cannot make any laws about) religion. Is she high?

The second part of her initial statement worse than the first, and it's just plain ignorant. She asserts that the founding fathers didn't intend for church and state to be seperated. It is true that our founders were men of God. Many were Deists, a religious movement whose followers believed that while God created the world, He didn't actively intervene in it. This philosophy is apparent in the way Deists like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin set up our government. People (well, white men who owned property) were free from government intervention. Who the hell does Katherine Harris think she is to question the intentions of the men who created our country? Really, now. Does she think that the calligrapher made a mistake? Does she think that Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin were too scared to share their point of view? Jesus. And I mean that.

The gall this woman has. How high above the rest of us does she think she is, to question the motives of the Founding Fathers? She has GOT to know that what she's saying isn't true. Said only to energize her currently lagging base. Hell, the man who originally appointed her as Attorney General of Florida, Governor Jeb Bush, doesn't even think she can win against the Democratic candidate. So I guess now she's just trying to kill any hope of a political career she might have afterward. So better for the rest of us.

I am disgusted at the current political climate. Wake me up when it's 1984, so I can kill myself.