I made some comments on Mitt Romney’s speech on Turkana’s diary yesterday, but I’ve been stewing on it all night, and wanted to put my thoughts in as cohesive a place as I could.
Whither Our Candidates?
I dare any of our candidates to get up in public and refute this phrase:
"Religion requires freedom, and freedom requires religion" – Mitt Romney
I dare them. Hell, I double dog dare them.
Get up and say something like:
"Religion may require freedom for its fair and unfettered practice, as the first settlers in this country and our Founders knew. The suggestion that the opposite is true, that freedom requires some form of religion, however, is shocking, wrong, and against everything that this country stands for."
C'mon - Obama? Clinton? Edwards?
Why can't any damn Democrat get up and say "you know what? I'm a _____, but I know plenty of fine Americans who are good moral citizens who don't believe what I believe. Mitt Romney's speech is the first step towards shattering freedom, not ennobling it."
Why should they?
Because that statement of Mitt’s is flat-out wrong. As smarter people than I have noted, it’s a Doublespeak phrase worthy of Orwell.
Want irrefutable, American-as-apple-pie proof?
Our Most Sacred Document
"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
Goddamnit! It's right there in the fucking Declaration!
We are free because Creator (God, Universe, Science, Nature, Jaweh, Budda, Allah, Christ, Shiva, Nothing, Wankan Tanka, Creatrix) made all people free - but the right to freedom is not enforced by the Church. It is enforced by the Government of a consenting populace, made up of laws written by free humans.
My Beliefs
I'm not an atheist or agnostic. I'm probably best described as a pantheist - I think all of the names of God are true, and that every way you can talk to God is a good one. Even if "talking to God" means exploring the science and math that underlies the universe.
I believe that however you tune into God - or the absence of God and find humanism or scientific reason in it's place - is a good an valid path. I have from the time I declared myself an atheist as a 12 year old Jew, to my flirtation with Christianity, to my study of Bhuddism, to my deep reverence for Native American traditions, wandered a path that evolved with me because I was free from religious expectation.
I think true religious growth and devotion DOES require freedom - the kind of freedom that this country, above and beyond others, has been a shining example of.
However, I strongly reject the notion that my freedom...my personal freedom or the freedom we enjoy as a nation...is dependent upon religion.
I don't know how that would work. In my experience, when God talks to me, it is rarely (or never) in the form of broadcasts or burning bush, there for everyone else to see or hear.
Usually it is whispers, half heard over the cosmic radio, sometimes that I only understand after the fact.
How - HOW? - could I ever expect that everyone else's freedom in this country could come at the imposition of my "religion"?
My point, and I do have one is that Freedom does not require Religion...
Freedom From Religious Interference
Freedom requires the laws of a government of, by, and for the people, which can govern free from interference by Religion. In return, those people are able to worship in whatever manner they choose, without interference from the government.
If Religion wants (and should have) freedom from Governmental interference, it should also accept as a part of that deal that any fair government must be free from any religious test or requirement.....just like the Constitution says.
Romney's speech is the biggest fucking pile of Doublespeak I've ever heard.
And as far as I’m concerned, any true Democratic leader should have the courage to get up and denounce it as the first step on a path to Theocracy – which was exactly what the founders of America were fleeing from and seeking freedom from.
So again I say – Democratic candidates? Where are you?