Here’s a clip from Harvey Wasserman’s most recent article, “The Fundamentalist Attack on Separation of Church and State Defames America and Its Founders”:
Today’s corporate-funded fundamentalist jihad is at war with America’s uniquely diverse revolutionary soul. Spitting in the face of our historic core, the Big Lie of a “Christian nation” is vintage Rove at his most Orwellian.
The right-wing’s multi-front war on American democracy now aims at our core belief in separation of church and state. It includes an attempt to say the founding fathers endorsed the idea that this is a “Christian nation,” with an official religion.
But the founders—and a vast majority of Americans—repeatedly, vehemently and with stunning clarity denounced, rejected and despised such beliefs.
Nowhere in the Constitution they wrote does the word “Christian” or the name of Christ appear. The very first phrase of the First Amendment demands that “Congress shall make no law concerning an establishment of religion.”
One major reason Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Ethan Allen and the vast majority of early Americans rejected the merger of church and state was the lingering stench of Puritan intolerance. The infamous theocratic murders of the Salem witch trials sickened the American soul, just as today’s power grab by Karl Rove’s new corporate fundamentalists creates an atmosphere of intolerance and fear, defined by the world’s largest prison gulag…
America’s founding genius lit up the world with secular pluralism. Those who attack our uniquely open spirit with phony scholarship are those whom George W. Bush might most accurately describe as “people who hate America.”
