Separation of Church and State is in danger. Read Paul Elysha of WAMC

Paul Elisha
October 19, 2004 - How America's Church-State Cabal Plots Last Rites for Democracy
The French may not have been America's allies, in George W. Bush's misguided invasion of Iraq but a Frenchman named Bonaparte has certainly been a closer counsel to our current President, than most of this country's wisest savants. To a questioning member of the nobility, in 1801, Napoleon wrote: "A nation must have a religion and that religion must be under the control of the government."
This observation was neither new nor naïve. It had been periodically raised and advanced by religious and political power-mongers, throughout the history of both venues. The founders of this nation, most of them ardent believers, knew and understood the danger such thinking posed for any experiment in democracy. When drafting a constitution for his own Virginia colony, even before it became a state, Jefferson wrote that it does no harm for anyone to say, there are twenty Gods or one God. An abiding fear of the possible unholy alliance between religion and government led Emerson, more than seventy years after we became a republic, to write that God builds his temple in the heart, on the ruins of churches and religions.
So how did we get to this place, in a time of supposed enlightenment beyond most of the barriers that centuries of ignorance have thrown up against us? How has this recognized bastion in the defense of individual freedom become the comfortable home of a dogma, that demands submission of its populace and is almost certain to accrue their eventual enslavement? How could we have allowed the imposition of such a scheme, by one of the most hypocritical leaders in our history? Throughout that history, we've successfully opposed puritanical zealots and pietistic bigots who've attempted to ensnare our national intellect within the narrow confines of fundamentalist dogma, trying to keep the ethos of this democracy from resembling what its founders projected. Now, in the guise of preservation, that ethos is about to be cynically subverted.
This President and his demonic accomplices argue, their only motives are for the defense and furtherance of life. Those who condemned most of medieval Europe and its chattel in the Americas to degradation, torture and death, for centuries, argued the same. They protested it, even as they strapped their victims to the rack or bound them to stakes for burning, promising that this was the only route to their eventual salvation. In truth, they played God with the imposition of life and death, its real purpose to acquire power and amass wealth, for a dynastic few and their coterie.
President Bush defends his withholding of foreign aid from nations who allow birth control practices, as merely the result of his belief in a pro-life measure. In effect he condemns thousands of innocent mothers and their already born children to death from malnutrition and starvation, as punishment for what his religion perceives as a crime. He does the same, here, with stem-cell research, withholding the hope of life, contained in protoplasm that his teaching holds more valuable, than the lives of those its utilization might help. It's been the exertion of this sort of fiendish triage on hapless populations, for centuries, that's made the purveyors of fundamentalist religions anathema, to those who understand its ultimate hypocrisy and deadly levying of power.
But beyond the overwhelming humanist arguments against the pernicious partnership of religion and government, is its contradiction of the very logic on which this democracy is balanced; the concept that a body of free yet responsible individuals can collectively decide on what's in the long-term best interest of most of its members, without - in the process - depriving any of them of their individual rights. To this day, the best description of the rationale of our democracy was contained in a ruling of the revered Justice Learned Hand who explained, that while each of us has the right to make a fist, the right to extend it ends with the tip of our neighbor's nose. The reach exercised by this President and his fundamentalist oligarchy, has now extended far beyond what any citizen's nose can or should reasonably tolerate.
But to this outrage, we can also now add duplicity. While the President simpers that his sanctimonious deceptions are merely the result of his personal conversations with the Almighty, a presumption that insults any connection the rest of us might have, his henchman in the Congress are conspiring to turn church leaders into power brokers, in the coming critical election. They've quietly attached a Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act to the Jobs Creation Act of 2004. This allows churches and their leaders to legally endorse candidates and lend support to their campaigns, without losing their tax-exempt status. It's the ultimate step, in making the church and state true partners in governing the people of the United States. And they've done it by using an already passed Jobs act that's in the final conference stage, before signing by the President.
If the tip of your nose is beginning to smart, you'd best scream "STOP!" and quickly, to your congressperson and senator. But beyond this, you can ensure this important constitutional separation by separating its annihilators from power. That's clearly casting a pro-life vote for democracy.