The Disappearing Wall - NYT

[rndmprsn]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/opinion/26tue1.html

To the dismay of many mainstream religious leaders, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, participated in a weekend telecast organized by conservative Christian groups to smear Democrats as enemies of "people of faith." Besides listening to Senator Frist's videotaped speech, viewers heard a speaker call the Supreme Court a despotic oligarchy. Meanwhile, the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, has threatened the judiciary for not following the regressive social agenda he shares with the far-right fundamentalists controlling his party.

Apart from confirming an unwholesome disrespect for traditional American values like checks and balances, the assault on judges is part of a wide-ranging and successful Republican campaign to breach the wall between church and state to advance a particular brand of religion. No theoretical exercise, the program is having a corrosive effect on policymaking and the lives of Americans.

The centerpiece is President Bush's so-called faith-based initiative, which disregards decades of First Amendment law and civil rights protections. Mr. Bush promised that federal money would not be used to support religious activities directly, but it is. The program has channeled billions of taxpayers' dollars to churches and other religion-based providers of social services under legally questionable rules that allow plenty of room for proselytizing and imposing religious tests on hiring. The initiative even provides taxpayers' money to build and renovate houses of worship that are also used to offer social services...

...In a recent Op-Ed article in The Times, John Danforth, the former Republican senator and U.N. ambassador who is also a minister, said his party was becoming a political arm of the religious right. He called it a formula for divisiveness that ultimately threatened the party's future. With the nation lurching toward the government sponsorship of religion, and the Senate nearing a showdown over Mr. Bush's egregious judicial nominees, it is a warning well worth heeding.

[applegrove]

1. Thanks for posting. n/t

[ClintonTyree]

2. Where was this?

Page 14 below the fold? The Talibornagains are using OUR tax dollars to campaign against Democratic candidates. bush has completely dissolved the line between church and state. We already HAVE a State sanctioned religion. There's no "maybe" about it. It's already happened.
I've been told on DU that we Democrats have to "reach out" to these people. :eyes: Yeah.....

[rndmprsn]

3. UGH

yeah that bothered me the most in a most disturbing article...the fact that public money is now being spent by churches to convert people to fundamentalism and then join their movement to destroy our goverment.