Their Theocracy, and Ours

The Progressive Magazine:

The failure of American efforts to transform Iraq into a free society comes at a time when we are experiencing a crisis in our own country over the basic concepts of freedom, democracy, and the separation of church and state.

Recently, while I was in Washington, I heard a young conservative woman assert that there is "no such thing" as the separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution. Senator Rick Santorum, the family-values, anti-abortion crusader in the Senate, makes the same assertion in his new book, It Takes a Family. Various web pages echo this claim, supposedly debunking the secular myth of church/state separation in this country.........

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From the beginning, our country was founded on a radical notion of individual human freedom. Freedom from religious and political persecution was at the front of the founders' minds. That is why they wisely chose to separate God from government.

The hollow rhetoric of the Bush Administration, from "operation Iraqi freedom" to the commingling of evangelical Christianity with the idea of an American mission to spread democracy around the globe, is a betrayal of those founding ideals.

The new theocrats like to invoke a kind of phony traditionalism, based on nostalgia, when they argue that the founding fathers support their own, revisionist idea of American history and America's place in the world. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this Administration is continually violating the founders' vision of America, whether it is taking war-making powers from Congress and improperly bestowing them on the President, spying on American citizens to thwart a vague and amorphous terrorist threat, chilling free speech with threatening language about national security, or declaring that
America is a Christian nation with a mission to bring its philosophy, at gunpoint, to the rest of the world.

Defending the real core values of America has never been more important.