Can I Have That Straight, Without the Twist

As I often enjoy....wait, enjoy is the wrong word...as I often do, because if you don't read every side of an argument, you're the most likely one to say something stupid, I was perusing the left hand side of the media realm this evening and stumbled across a pretty decent 3/4 of an article on the Huffington Post. It wasn't that long ago that Arianna Huffington was a darling of the conservative movement, appearing on, of all things, Bill Maher's libertarian leaning show on ABC, Politically Incorrect. That was apparently before both of them became pod people and discarded independent thought for Statist dogma.

In any case, I was reading this article regarding Rick Santorum's comments on JFK's speech on separation of church and state and I'll be darned if I didn't agree with almost every bit of it until the tail end. I've written several times about the questionable proposition of an actual separation of church and state (or the language supporting such an idea), as it defies the actual language in the Constitution, as is pointed out by the author of this article as well as he rightly points out that after the passage of the Constitution, some states had official religions. After all, we have also recently had a decision that effectively says religious discrimination is appropriate for churches. It is the ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE, that the federal government should not establish a religion.

We may all remember that many of the original colonists came to the West to escape religious persecution because the Anglican Church (not Catholic mind you) was the official church of England (as apparently Henry VIII didn't much care for being confined to hell because of the Pope, so he executed his wives rather than divorce).

Yet, at the end of this well reasoned article, the author turns to the unreasoned and unsupported proposition that the First Amendment was meant to shield the United States from Catholicism. He further concludes that the First Amendment is not a constraint on government, but rather the Catholic church.

Such a conclusion is ludicrous. We cannot twist the facts to come to conclusions which simply serve our own purposes. We have to be honest and straight or this nation will fail.