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ON DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES PANDERING ON FAITH
TERRY MICHAEL, POLITICO - Having worked as press spokesman for the
Democratic National Committee 20 years ago, when the late Rev. Jerry
Falwell's Moral Majority was in full flower, I am appalled at how little
possible future leaders of the free world have learned from decades of
mixing "faith" and politics.
I came to Washington in 1975 with the late Paul Simon, working for five
years as his House press secretary and later traveling with him for
seven months as spokesman for his 1988 presidential campaign. Never once
in the almost four decades I knew the Illinois Democrat did I ever hear
him invoke religion or mention God in a speech, or even in private
conversation, though I assumed his religious views were probably those
you would expect from the son of Christian missionaries to China (where
he was conceived in 1928) and the brother of a Lutheran minister.
A man with the moral rectitude of an Eagle Scout, Simon understood why
the Founders included not a single reference to a deity in our
Constitution. The best way to protect your right to be guided by faith
(and mine to be guided by reason) is to keep our understandings of where
we come from and how we come to be moral animals on the other side of a
very high wall between the state, with its coercive powers, and the
temples created by believers.
The willingness of Democratic candidates to breach that barrier reflects
a failure of nerve in a political party that ought to be our best hope
for secular governance in a world where so much hate and murder is still
being unleashed by "people of faith," whose beliefs were never touched
by The Age of Reason and The Enlightenment -- the same felicitous era in
human history that gave us Jefferson and others averse to the mingling
of religion and governance.
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=02D086CC-3048-5C12-001E10E7C7D615A2
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ON DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES PANDERING ON FAITH
TERRY MICHAEL, POLITICO - Having worked as press spokesman for the
Democratic National Committee 20 years ago, when the late Rev. Jerry
Falwell's Moral Majority was in full flower, I am appalled at how little
possible future leaders of the free world have learned from decades of
mixing "faith" and politics.
I came to Washington in 1975 with the late Paul Simon, working for five
years as his House press secretary and later traveling with him for
seven months as spokesman for his 1988 presidential campaign. Never once
in the almost four decades I knew the Illinois Democrat did I ever hear
him invoke religion or mention God in a speech, or even in private
conversation, though I assumed his religious views were probably those
you would expect from the son of Christian missionaries to China (where
he was conceived in 1928) and the brother of a Lutheran minister.
A man with the moral rectitude of an Eagle Scout, Simon understood why
the Founders included not a single reference to a deity in our
Constitution. The best way to protect your right to be guided by faith
(and mine to be guided by reason) is to keep our understandings of where
we come from and how we come to be moral animals on the other side of a
very high wall between the state, with its coercive powers, and the
temples created by believers.
The willingness of Democratic candidates to breach that barrier reflects
a failure of nerve in a political party that ought to be our best hope
for secular governance in a world where so much hate and murder is still
being unleashed by "people of faith," whose beliefs were never touched
by The Age of Reason and The Enlightenment -- the same felicitous era in
human history that gave us Jefferson and others averse to the mingling
of religion and governance.
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=02D086CC-3048-5C12-001E10E7C7D615A2
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