"Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who are the most blessed of us all?" At least this is what I assume all those right-wing Christian fundamentalists say every time they stand in-front of the mirror to comb their hair or pick their noses. The moral issue that seems to be at the center of the post-election debate still bugs me. Never have I seen, in any fully functioning democratic countries around the world, that morality plays such a pivotal role in deciding the outcome of an election--in a heterogeneous country, nonetheless. One would think that in a country like the United States, that prides herself on cultural and ethnic diversity, would consign the issue of religion and morality to the private sphere of each individual. For these religious nutcases and their cohorts who believe that this country was founded on the bedrock principles of Judeo-Christianity beliefs (their own narrow version, anyway), are simply delusional and ignorant of historical facts.
Okay, where does it say in the US Constitution that religion, much less one of the Judeo-Christianity tradition, should be the sole underpinning of the public policy-making process? As far as I'm concern, religion is only mentioned three times in the US Constitution: The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment that prohibits the formation of a national religion; Article I, Section 6 that bans any kind of religious testing for people who wants to run for public office; and finally, the Free Exercise Clause that ensures people the freedom to practice their faiths without any interference from the government.
These religious nutcases often argue that it was the implicit intention of the Founding Fathers (the Framers) to create this country out of the Judeo-Christianity values. Well, by simply reading the US Constitution closely, one would think the intention of the Framers was clearly set upon constructing a divide between the Church and the State. If the unison of religion and governing was truly their intention, why wouldn't they explicitly written it into the Constitution? Instead of creating the Establishment Clause, they could have written that puritanical version of Protestanism is the official religion of the country and all manner of governing and public affairs should be conducted according to its strict and narrow moral codes. I guess it wouldn't be that hard for all the fifty-five Framers to agree on establishing a national religion since they also agreed on making a slave three-fifth of a human being for the sake of population counting towards determining the representation in the First Continental Congress.
Now, why wouldn't they? These people, though they disagreed on a great many issue, but one thing they unanimously agreed on was the separation of the religion and the state. They knew first-hand of what it was like when the state and the religion were simply indistinguishable and the dominance of one faith led to the persecution of others. They fled the old country for this exact reason and there was simply no way that they were going to resurrect the same practice here. The United States was founded on the secularistic principles and it never was the intention of the Framers for the government to legislate morality and religion, and that one's faith and beliefs should claim their rightful place, which is securely within each individual's own private domain.
I do have plenty of things to bitch about when it comes to the morality issue in politics but I have plenty of shit to do right now, like studying for my Congressional Politics and Constitutional Law exams next week, and not including a couple of papers that also will be due next week. I will keep writing about this moral issue until I can find some right-wing Evangelical Christian idiots like the Southern Baptist or the Pentecostal people out on the streets and just unload my frustrations on them--verbally and civilly, of course.
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