This past week I heard an interesting interview on The Al Franken Show, with Brooke Allen, author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. She is a historian who was tired of hearing Christian conservatives talking about how America is a “Christian Nation.” Her research shows that our Founding Fathers were pretty vehemently against any role for organized religion in our civic life.

More than a few politicians and conservative religious figures have offered statements to the effect that there really is no “wall of separation between church and state” in the Constitution, and even if you can interpret the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment as such, it really wasn’t the intent of the Founders to create such a wall.

Professor Allen dug up a fascinating quote from Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association on January 1, 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

I tend to think that Jefferson knew a thing or two about what the Founders really meant. So when you hear someone say that the separation between church and state is the construction of “activist judges,” you can be assured they’re full of it.

If so-called “good” Christians, the ones who claim to believe that every word of the Bible is divinely given and infallible, are honest to their beliefs, then Leviticus once again comes to the rescue and this time settles the immigration debate.

Leviticus 19:33-34 says:

Now that that’s settled, the “good” Christians can go back to hating gays, killing those who eat shellfish, stoning their mouthy children, and selling their no-good bitch daughers into slavery, just as Leviticus demands.

My Bible tells me it was the evil Roman Empire who used torture to oppress those sharing truth and knowledge. The evil Soviet Empire built gulags to torture and oppress those seeking truth and justice too. Now we learn that the Bush Administration is using former Soviet gulags as secret torture prisons?

Do these twits not understand irony? Actually, irony isn’t the right word. What is the word for something that is ironic, appalling, immoral, unconscionable, and may even border on crimes against humanity? The closest term I can think of is: the official policy promoted by Vice President Cheney.

The hubris, the unmitigated and unbridled gall of Dick “I had other priorities than serving during Vietnam” Cheney going to the U.S. Senate and fighting against a bill written by torture victim John McCain. It really takes some balls to stand before McCain and say that torture should be a legitimate option for interrogating terrorists.

Well, if the Vice President does have such durable testicles, perhaps they might come in handy to prove a point. If our esteemed vice-leader truly thinks torture is useful and in the best interests of the United States, it would be an interesting experiment to have a CIA interrogator drop by the Veep’s office and show him how easy it is to get bad intelligence through torture.

My bet is that if someone attached some electrodes to Mr. Cheney’s testicles, he’d give up every secret he had, confess to the Natalie Holloway murder, and offer to to do Rockette kicks while singing “Happy Days are Here Again”… all before a single volt is ever applied. I’m guessing this because it’s my theory that only cowards would prescribe torture.

Yes, I’m saying that the Vice President is what folks down in Texas would call a “yellow-bellied sum-bitch.” And if the President thinks torture is acceptable, then he’s one too.

Sorry my argument isn’t more fleshed out… still kinda flabbergasted by the brazen obscenity of our country’s leadership.

This is going to be my only entry discussing the Schiavo disaster. And it is a disaster. It used to be merely a tragic story, but when the religio-political opportunists got involved, it turned into a farce, and then rushed headlong into being a disaster. (more…)

Tonight’s David Lawrence Show started out about the great ruling by a California judge that the state’s ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional. But then the rest of the hour devolved into David’s rantings about the FCC. I don’t disagree, however, with David’s rants… the FCC is filling its docket with the insane whining of puritanical fascists, and threatening to bankrupt anybody who dares utter a dirty word. But I mostly enjoy teasing David when he begins to froth at the mouth. :-)

You’ll have to buy two segments (yes, a whole 50¢ you cheap bastard!) because I stayed on into the second hour.

It’s almost 2005. It must be time to revisit the Scopes Monkey Trial!

Right on schedule, and perhaps not surprisingly only weeks after the alleged “religious conservative”-driven election victory, school districts around the country are entertaining the teaching of Creationism – the “science” derived from the story of creation contained in the Bible.
(more…)