{"id":4548,"date":"2012-02-15T10:23:46","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T16:23:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/?p=4548"},"modified":"2012-02-15T10:23:46","modified_gmt":"2012-02-15T16:23:46","slug":"republicans-drumming-up-a-phony-war-on-religionagain-the-party-of-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/election\/republicans-drumming-up-a-phony-war-on-religionagain-the-party-of-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans “Drumming up a phony war on religion”–again. The Party of Fear."},"content":{"rendered":"

Drumming up a phony war on religion – The Washington Post<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

But it is Rick Santorum<\/a> who wins the award for histrionics. Progressives, he said last week in Texas, are \u201ctaking faith and crushing it.\u201d From that ridiculous proposition, he went on in truly hallucinatory fashion:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what\u2019s left is the French Revolution. What\u2019s left is a government that gives you rights. What\u2019s left are no unalienable rights. What\u2019s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you\u2019ll do and when you\u2019ll do it. What\u2019s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we\u2019re a long way from that, but if we follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wow. \u2026<\/p>\n

This is a war? This is a march to the guillotine?<\/p>\n

Romney and Gingrich know better; they\u2019re just cynically pandering to religious conservatives. Santorum, at least, is sincere in his pre-Enlightenment beliefs. But rejection of the intellectual framework that produced not just the French Revolution but the American Revolution as well does not strike me as an appropriate philosophy for a U.S. presidential candidate to espouse, much less a winning platform to run on.<\/p>\n

The Founders wisely decided to institutionalize separation of church and state. The references to God, the Creator and Divine Providence in the Declaration of Independence mask the fact that the Founders disagreed on the nature and existence of a Supreme Being. They understood the difference between faith and religiosity.<\/p>\n

Within our secular governmental framework, religion has thrived. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Drumming up a phony war on religion – The Washington Post<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drumming up a phony war on religion – The Washington Post But it is Rick Santorum who wins the award for histrionics. Progressives, he said last week in Texas, are \u201ctaking faith and crushing it.\u201d From that ridiculous proposition, he went on in truly hallucinatory fashion: \u201cWhen you marginalize faith in America, when you remove … Continue reading Republicans “Drumming up a phony war on religion”–again. The Party of Fear.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}