THE WAR ON THE CHURCH-STATE WALL…. Republican candidates’ antipathy for constitutional principles has been on display quite a bit lately, but ThinkProgress flags another gem this morning, highlighting extremist Senate candidate Ken Buck’s (R) approach to church-state separation.
“I disagree strongly with the concept of separation of church and state. It was not written into the Constitution. While we have a Constitution that is very strong in the sense that we are not gonna have a religion that’s sanctioned by the government, it doesn’t mean that we need to have a separation between government and religion. And so that, that concerns me a great deal. So I think there are cultural differences, I think there, we are as strong as we, our culture, our culture gives us our strength, I guess is the best way to put that.
“And, and I am worried about the fact that we seem to be walking away from culture. And, and one thing that President Obama has done that I would certainly speak about is calling the Christmas tree, which has historically been called a Christmas tree in Washington DC, a holiday tree. It’s just flat wrong in my mind.”
The comments, made in Colorado late last year, are remarkably dumb, and the argument that President Obama re-named a Christmas tree is demonstrably false. Either Buck was lying, or was popping off on a subject he knew nothing about.
Of course, if this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen and heard quite a few attacks these First Amendment principles lately. Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell recently humiliated herself during a debate by rejecting the separation of church state as a constitutional principle, and Nevada’s Sharron Angle recently made very similar remarks. Last week, Rush Limbaugh denounced the very idea of church-state separation, and in April, former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) rejected any notion that “God should be separated from the state.”
I just wrote up a lengthy item on the history here a few days ago, so I won’t re-hash it again. Needless to say, the separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of the American system of government, and the foundation for the greatest experiment in religious liberty the world has ever known.
But putting aside the fact that these unhinged Republicans simply have no idea what they’re talking about, I have a related concern: what is it, exactly, they’d replace church-state separation with?
What we’re seeing is, to a certain extent, the rise of the Taliban wing of the Republican Party — the Taliban rails against secularism, and insists that the law must mirror and be based on their interpretation of a religious text. Buck, O’Donnell, Angle, Limbaugh, and Palin have all argued something eerily similar. Thomas Jefferson said the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between church and state,” and these Republicans are anxious to tear it down.
Let’s say, for the sake of conversation, they succeed. What then? Once the foundation for religious liberty in America is gone, what does Ken Buck suggest we replace it with? There are some countries that endorse Buck’s worldview and intermix God and government — Iran and Afghanistan under Taliban rule come to mind — but they’re generally not countries the United States tries to emulate.
So what do Buck and his ilk have in store for us? A European-style official church? A theocracy along the lines of Saudi Arabia? Are conservatives who want the government to shrink also telling us they want the state to play a larger role in promoting and “helping” religious institutions?
When the right denounces the American principles that have made us great, they stop being merely wrong, and start becoming even more dangerous.
