Theocratic Theories

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Rochester, N.Y. suburb of Greece's practice of holding Christian-oriented sectarian prayers to start town council meetings was constitutional. Although Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only member of the dissenting liberal minority who is not Jewish, wrote that such a ruling allowed the ostracizing of religious minorities in public meetings, the all-Catholic conservative majority dismissed that argument with the point that Christian prayer before public meetings is a tradition that goes all the way back to the founding of the republic.

You know what else was accepted as "traditional" at the founding of the republic? Five slaves being the equivalent of three citizens. Did I happen to mention that the reason public meetings in the 1790s began with Christian prayer is because there were very few non-Christians in the United States then, and most of them were American Indians - i.e., non-citizens?

When began in the 1950s with the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and the adoption of "In God We Trust" as the official national motto - at about the same time this lie, having before only appeared on coinage, began appearing on paper currency and postage stamps (canceled with the slogan "PRAY FOR PEACE") as well - and continued in the 1980s with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson appearing at Republican gatherings and President Reagan declaring that church and state were "inseparable" is accelerating faster than a speeding bullet with more power than a locomotive. But this ain't truth, justice or the American way. Church-state pairing is evident in Alabama's Chief Justice declaring that the First Amendment doesn't apply to non-Christians and with lawmakers with no trouble imposing a fundamentalist interpretation of the Old Testament (not the New Testament, the Old Testament) on the rest of us hypocritically fearful of Shari'a law (what?), with Jesus's support for the separation of church and state ("Render unto Caesar that which is of Caesar") conveniently forgotten.

Why doesn't the Republican Party simply have its next convention in a megachurch in Tulsa? There should be plenty of room.