Dan Patrick appears to be one of those who thinks the Establishment Clause means that Congress is only prohibited from declaring one individual sect the official Church of the United States.
Article VI bans religious tests for holding public office. That sure sounds like church-state separation to me. Nowhere does the Constitution assign religion a role in governance.
“and soldiers who refused to be vaccinated and were punished should have their positions restored and be financially compensated.”
Does that include the soldiers that were divinely punished for refusing the vaccines? I mean, how can we bring them back from the dead to pay them for suffering from government overreach? I’m still befuddled by the fact that any soldier thought they should be exempt from the shots, because the first day of basic training was a gauntlet (literally) of vaccinations and prophylactic antibiotics, none of which you knew what they were or had an opportunity to refuse. Yes the penicillin shot was only given to those that were medically determined to not be allergic. Soldiers were also used as test subjects for developing PPE and stuff. I personally helped test the latest version of the protective masks. And recently there’s been a flu outbreak that has killed soldiers because the regime has allowed soldiers to refuse vaccines and the military is backing away from the policy. It’s almost like there’s a reason the military requires soldiers get vaccinated.
Of course it’s the same tired argument. The phrase “church state separation” or “wall of separation” is not in the constitution, blah blah blah. They have one brain cell between them (I’m talking about the entire population of MAGA, from Trump, his cabinet, all the Christian nationalists using him and every Harry, Dick or Tom that drops their insulin money on anything with a Trump stamp on it) and they use that brain cell to transmit the same dozen bumper sticker philosophies to the group. I mean, did you see Katie Miller’s baby announcement where she repeated the “Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince women this is oppressive.” nonsense. That exact quote is on innumerable memes lately, some with an AI cartoon of the all American blond haired, blue eyed, mom dad and two children with a golden retriever in the kitchen, some with the mom and baby shit. Other examples are the word for word repeat of one influencer making a statement about how he’s disappointed in women, but there are thirty different influencers making the exact same video (Will Hitchens loves to point these guys out, they’re usually manosphere guys, but there is always a woman repeating it too.). We love to make fun of the new script they’ve all downloaded. They don’t argue or debate, they all just rattle,off the same talking points over and over, TDS, Biden was suffering from dementia, gas prices, they should have come her legally, they should have listened to the cops, she was trying to run him over (two incidents now, it’s an easy excuse) and so on. Trump says something at a rally or on tv, suddenly it’s gospel and the sheep regurgitate it over and over and over again. (Ranting again, oops) It makes sense that their commission on religious propaganda, sorry religious freedumb, damnit protecting religious freedom is just a long collection of debunked lies spewed word for word by lunatic disgraced preachers.
C’mon folks, you’re supposed to put things into your own words when you plagiarize, change the order of the phrases, pull out a thesaurus to find synonyms, something, anything so that it is not obvious that you are just repeating something you heard from a hundred other idiots. SMDH
Sometimes I wonder if the Garden of Eden had a sign outside the gate saying “Garden of Eden”.
I have a vague memory of asking, at a young age, my pastor father where the GOE was and could we go see it and his saying no one knew where it had been and it was gone now. And thinking (surely in less mature form) that something so important surely couldn’t have just slipped thru the cracks. I wouldn’t say it was a step toward atheism but it was surely a sense of disappointment in religion and god.
This is what I sent to the comments for the report:
I only read the very first sentence of your report to discover that you started from an assertion that "religious liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society". This tells me that you were going to ramble on for a couple of hundred pages without proving your simple, profound truth.
The fact is that most of our lawmakers are Christian of some type. Writing a 224 page report to tell me that they feel persecuted is the most egregious attempt at gaslighting I've ever seen. There is a clause in the Constitution of the United States that you clearly haven't read (of course I see no evidence that anyone in the Trump administration has read any of the Constitution); the clause states: there will be no religious requirement for public office. From my perspective that means that anyone who wears their religion on their sleeve should not be running for office in the first place. My hope is that the American people will wake up (yea, that's right, they'd then be 'woke') and see you for the hacks, liars, anti-democratic traitors that you are. I hope that your feeble attempt at gas-lighting the American public will backfire spectacularly and the churches will start to empty out.
Oh, and should you think for one second that I am not an American patriot (a real one not the traitors claiming to be patriots that are screaming about it the loudest right now) but I am a patriot. I love my country, or I would if the fascists would leave it alone. I am a US Army disabled veteran. I gave my future to this country and now I see people who hate everything about what makes it great try to tear it down.
So no, I didn't read beyond the first sentence of your sham report because I didn't need to.
Some days, the level of Christian entitlement in the current US of A really does get to me.
The single most powerful voting bloc in the country has the nerve to whine about how hard their lives are when they're asked to make a little room for anyone not exactly as white, conservative, Christian, heterosexual, and bigoted as they are. The mind boggles. They claim persecution and suffering whenever some snowflake is told 'no' for any reason, care nothing at all for those outside their religious bubble, and then claim ownership of the entire nation. The cannot stay in their lane and inject themselves into any space they think needs their hand for moral or ethical reasons, despite having shown several times in recent memory that Christians are not any more moral or ethical than any other group. The sheer narcissism is staggering.
Please forgive today's rant. I'm tired, frustrated, and completely sick of dealing with this whole attitude. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.
Actually, the opening occurred considerably before then, when Ronald Reagan all but invited the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition organizations into the Republican party. Indeed, the insertion of religion and more specifically Christianity into American politics goes back even further.
I heartily recommend One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Created Christian America by Kevin Kruse. Kevin describes the history and process from the reaction to Roosevelt's New Deal, which is where this really all started.
He did invite them in, by announcing his candidacy in that little town in Mississippi, where the KKK killed the Civil rights workers, dramatized in "Mississippi Burning". They knew the significance of that choice.
The Huffpost had an article by I think, the last survivor of Stonewall – claimed anyway. It should be somewhere in my bookmarks but I've got so many these days. And I have to go out. But it might easily be findable.
“the separation of church and state is the biggest lie that's been told in America since our founding.”
No, the biggest lie is actually very difficult to determine, because there are so many of them.
One of the huge lies that’s been told since our founding is that Christianity is true, Christianity is good, Christianity represents reality, Christianity represents morality— in short, the Christianity represents anything but power and money.
Another huge lie is that there is something called Christianity. There are so many different ChristianitieS that they might as well be called Christianity One, Christianity Two, Christianity Three all the way up to Christianity Gazillion.
Jesus said his kingdom is out of this world. Modern day Christians never got that memo. In fact, a good portion of Christianity throughout its history has never gotten that memo. We’re right back to power and money.
There are a pile of other lies of course. Mormonism— the Scientology of 1820. God wants conservative Christians to have power over others. God hates vaccines, although how that one got in there is completely un biblical.
What we have here is authoritarian religion making its bid for power, along with all the other authoritarians that have tried to do that. The communist, the fascists, the Nazis, the Muslim Dominionists, the Zionism-uber-alles, the Sunnis, the Shia, the Wahbists, the drug lords, the war lords, big business, the the billionaires.
I know there are more, but I just woke up, first cuppa, yada yada.
“ One of the huge lies that’s been told since our founding is that Christianity is true, Christianity is good, Christianity represents reality, Christianity represents morality— in short, the Christianity represents anything but power and money.”
I hope you are better at counting cups of coffee than you are at counting lies! That’s way more than one huge lie.
Well, folks, there it is in black and white. The religious right has been so appalled by something that has been staring them square in the face for the last 200 years that they finally decided that it is somehow supposed to be erased from their sight. That is of course The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Apparently, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." Is not tantamount to declaring that church and state must be estranged from each other. Needless to say, the defeat of that clause is what the Christian nationalists have been after all this time.
The response to this needs to be swift, strong, and vociferous. These Nat-Cs need to be confronted with their opposition, firmly and determinedly, and whatever goals they are seeking nipped in the bud.
Not to do so is to endanger not just those of us who are atheists, but anyone who believes differently from these radicals.
It’s why I keep saying that our constitution no longer serves us. We need a strict, definite, unambiguous, unweaselable separation of church and state. Just like we need a second amendment that talks about gun ownership being regulated, because regulation isn’t the same thing as infringement.
It depends on which part of the country you are in. Some areas it is closer to being effectively gone, but the defense is strong. The biggest issue currently is keeping the defense down at the Appeals Court level until we can properly fix SCOTUS.
It's not really a matter of what one agrees with. There are states where people are forced to follow laws that are strictly in place because of religion. Those laws were put in place very carefully, and publicly, over decades, and no secular organizations did a thing about it.
Doesn't for a moment change the fact that we will fight it. And by "we," I mean the organizations I am a member of and support, which include the Freedom From Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and the ACLU. NONE of these outfits are paper tigers, and to imply that they are shows your own ignorance.
Couldn't agree more. The fact that Lt. Gov. Patrick is pontificating while the most amoral being on the planet dozes off should tell us everything there is to know about how frivolous nature of this effort on the part of the evangelicals. Maybe the Christian coalition will coalesce into green algae and find a new home.
Only a cult bereft of any inherent decency or moral values needs to force a populace into compliance with its 'beliefs."
If it had any broad appeal, people would seek it out but as we have seen with the Abrahamic cults, particularly the xtian one, conversion is achieved via violence and deceit.
The people pushing to end church-state separation always seem to operate under the assumption it will be their tribe calling the shots for everyone. They also assume that inserting religion into government would make the country a better place. This casually ignores the countless horrors perpetrated in the name of religion.
I can't find it now, but it was a montage of every president since Eisenhower wearing...a tan suit, just as you pointed out. In the bit I could find posted above he points out their flip-flops, bashing Obama for using a teleprompter then claiming trump was "presidential" for doing the same.
Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission would like to turn this country into a Christian theocracy. Their jaw dropping report and a chance for public comment can be found here:
"...the separation of church and state is not in the Constitution."
Neither is God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Christ, Christianity, Bible, Divine etc.
Dan Patrick appears to be one of those who thinks the Establishment Clause means that Congress is only prohibited from declaring one individual sect the official Church of the United States.
I really hate that he shares a name with one of my favorite sports commentators.
I really hate that he shares oxygen with the rest of humanity.
💯
Just because they aren’t declaring it, doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to do it.
Article VI bans religious tests for holding public office. That sure sounds like church-state separation to me. Nowhere does the Constitution assign religion a role in governance.
“and soldiers who refused to be vaccinated and were punished should have their positions restored and be financially compensated.”
Does that include the soldiers that were divinely punished for refusing the vaccines? I mean, how can we bring them back from the dead to pay them for suffering from government overreach? I’m still befuddled by the fact that any soldier thought they should be exempt from the shots, because the first day of basic training was a gauntlet (literally) of vaccinations and prophylactic antibiotics, none of which you knew what they were or had an opportunity to refuse. Yes the penicillin shot was only given to those that were medically determined to not be allergic. Soldiers were also used as test subjects for developing PPE and stuff. I personally helped test the latest version of the protective masks. And recently there’s been a flu outbreak that has killed soldiers because the regime has allowed soldiers to refuse vaccines and the military is backing away from the policy. It’s almost like there’s a reason the military requires soldiers get vaccinated.
Of course it’s the same tired argument. The phrase “church state separation” or “wall of separation” is not in the constitution, blah blah blah. They have one brain cell between them (I’m talking about the entire population of MAGA, from Trump, his cabinet, all the Christian nationalists using him and every Harry, Dick or Tom that drops their insulin money on anything with a Trump stamp on it) and they use that brain cell to transmit the same dozen bumper sticker philosophies to the group. I mean, did you see Katie Miller’s baby announcement where she repeated the “Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince women this is oppressive.” nonsense. That exact quote is on innumerable memes lately, some with an AI cartoon of the all American blond haired, blue eyed, mom dad and two children with a golden retriever in the kitchen, some with the mom and baby shit. Other examples are the word for word repeat of one influencer making a statement about how he’s disappointed in women, but there are thirty different influencers making the exact same video (Will Hitchens loves to point these guys out, they’re usually manosphere guys, but there is always a woman repeating it too.). We love to make fun of the new script they’ve all downloaded. They don’t argue or debate, they all just rattle,off the same talking points over and over, TDS, Biden was suffering from dementia, gas prices, they should have come her legally, they should have listened to the cops, she was trying to run him over (two incidents now, it’s an easy excuse) and so on. Trump says something at a rally or on tv, suddenly it’s gospel and the sheep regurgitate it over and over and over again. (Ranting again, oops) It makes sense that their commission on religious propaganda, sorry religious freedumb, damnit protecting religious freedom is just a long collection of debunked lies spewed word for word by lunatic disgraced preachers.
C’mon folks, you’re supposed to put things into your own words when you plagiarize, change the order of the phrases, pull out a thesaurus to find synonyms, something, anything so that it is not obvious that you are just repeating something you heard from a hundred other idiots. SMDH
Wait a minute! I thought thesauruses were extinct. 🤪
No, they are defunct, vanished, gone, expired, obsolete, done, departed, dead, unalive,
Pinin' for the fjords?
You are genuinely warped, ya know! 😁
I try to be. Though sometimesI like being woofed.
🐶🐕🐩🐕🦺
Noah tried to get them on the Ark but they were off playing silly games.
Still, we DID get green alligators and long-necked geese. Some humpty-back camels and some chimpanzees...
Rats and cats and something something something…..
elephants! And sure as you're born...🎶
Thank you.
Elephants, as sure as yer born…
I knew I could count on you!
As well as hiding out in treetops, shouting out rude names.
Nope, just changed their name.
Were they in the Garden of Eden ?
Sometimes I wonder if the Garden of Eden had a sign outside the gate saying “Garden of Eden”.
I have a vague memory of asking, at a young age, my pastor father where the GOE was and could we go see it and his saying no one knew where it had been and it was gone now. And thinking (surely in less mature form) that something so important surely couldn’t have just slipped thru the cracks. I wouldn’t say it was a step toward atheism but it was surely a sense of disappointment in religion and god.
I've gotten rather Bored of the Rings, where such creatures reside. 😉
Ar-ar! 😁
AI probably writes all their talking points, from the data they scrape off of old conspiracy websites!
It's not a proper cult unless it has a list of thought-terminating cliches to keep the cultists brainwashed.
This is what I sent to the comments for the report:
I only read the very first sentence of your report to discover that you started from an assertion that "religious liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society". This tells me that you were going to ramble on for a couple of hundred pages without proving your simple, profound truth.
The fact is that most of our lawmakers are Christian of some type. Writing a 224 page report to tell me that they feel persecuted is the most egregious attempt at gaslighting I've ever seen. There is a clause in the Constitution of the United States that you clearly haven't read (of course I see no evidence that anyone in the Trump administration has read any of the Constitution); the clause states: there will be no religious requirement for public office. From my perspective that means that anyone who wears their religion on their sleeve should not be running for office in the first place. My hope is that the American people will wake up (yea, that's right, they'd then be 'woke') and see you for the hacks, liars, anti-democratic traitors that you are. I hope that your feeble attempt at gas-lighting the American public will backfire spectacularly and the churches will start to empty out.
Oh, and should you think for one second that I am not an American patriot (a real one not the traitors claiming to be patriots that are screaming about it the loudest right now) but I am a patriot. I love my country, or I would if the fascists would leave it alone. I am a US Army disabled veteran. I gave my future to this country and now I see people who hate everything about what makes it great try to tear it down.
So no, I didn't read beyond the first sentence of your sham report because I didn't need to.
Sorry, this one got me hopped up this morning. I don't usually post more than once.
Nice looking dog, btw. Reminds just enough of my departed Emily to give me a little sad.
Some days, the level of Christian entitlement in the current US of A really does get to me.
The single most powerful voting bloc in the country has the nerve to whine about how hard their lives are when they're asked to make a little room for anyone not exactly as white, conservative, Christian, heterosexual, and bigoted as they are. The mind boggles. They claim persecution and suffering whenever some snowflake is told 'no' for any reason, care nothing at all for those outside their religious bubble, and then claim ownership of the entire nation. The cannot stay in their lane and inject themselves into any space they think needs their hand for moral or ethical reasons, despite having shown several times in recent memory that Christians are not any more moral or ethical than any other group. The sheer narcissism is staggering.
Please forgive today's rant. I'm tired, frustrated, and completely sick of dealing with this whole attitude. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.
Whitney's rants are one of my favorites.
Hugs. I always agree with your posts.
Dubya gave him the opening with that obscene 'Faith Based Initiative'.
Actually, the opening occurred considerably before then, when Ronald Reagan all but invited the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition organizations into the Republican party. Indeed, the insertion of religion and more specifically Christianity into American politics goes back even further.
I heartily recommend One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Created Christian America by Kevin Kruse. Kevin describes the history and process from the reaction to Roosevelt's New Deal, which is where this really all started.
I forgot about Regan, between the arms for hostages and MX missile BS. The cons can sure spread the crap.
He did invite them in, by announcing his candidacy in that little town in Mississippi, where the KKK killed the Civil rights workers, dramatized in "Mississippi Burning". They knew the significance of that choice.
OT: Today is Stonewall Day, on this day in 1969. Happy Pride.
❤🧡💛💚💙💜
The Huffpost had an article by I think, the last survivor of Stonewall – claimed anyway. It should be somewhere in my bookmarks but I've got so many these days. And I have to go out. But it might easily be findable.
Check out Lucien Truscott's substack he covered it for the Village Voice.
https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/i-was-there-at-stonewall-this-is?utm_source=publication-search
Oops, I forgot the wall part.
Larry, did it need to be so high?
I'll always upfist a Pink Floyd reference.
All in all, yes.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stonewall-riots-43-years-later_b_1632045
Found it.
🖤🤎❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🩶🤍
“the separation of church and state is the biggest lie that's been told in America since our founding.”
No, the biggest lie is actually very difficult to determine, because there are so many of them.
One of the huge lies that’s been told since our founding is that Christianity is true, Christianity is good, Christianity represents reality, Christianity represents morality— in short, the Christianity represents anything but power and money.
Another huge lie is that there is something called Christianity. There are so many different ChristianitieS that they might as well be called Christianity One, Christianity Two, Christianity Three all the way up to Christianity Gazillion.
Jesus said his kingdom is out of this world. Modern day Christians never got that memo. In fact, a good portion of Christianity throughout its history has never gotten that memo. We’re right back to power and money.
There are a pile of other lies of course. Mormonism— the Scientology of 1820. God wants conservative Christians to have power over others. God hates vaccines, although how that one got in there is completely un biblical.
What we have here is authoritarian religion making its bid for power, along with all the other authoritarians that have tried to do that. The communist, the fascists, the Nazis, the Muslim Dominionists, the Zionism-uber-alles, the Sunnis, the Shia, the Wahbists, the drug lords, the war lords, big business, the the billionaires.
I know there are more, but I just woke up, first cuppa, yada yada.
“ One of the huge lies that’s been told since our founding is that Christianity is true, Christianity is good, Christianity represents reality, Christianity represents morality— in short, the Christianity represents anything but power and money.”
I hope you are better at counting cups of coffee than you are at counting lies! That’s way more than one huge lie.
The executive summary begins with:
"The Commission’s work began with acknowledging a simple but profound truth: religious
liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society"
I didn't read further than that because they started from a premise they were not going to prove.
It's just a plain lie!
Well, folks, there it is in black and white. The religious right has been so appalled by something that has been staring them square in the face for the last 200 years that they finally decided that it is somehow supposed to be erased from their sight. That is of course The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Apparently, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." Is not tantamount to declaring that church and state must be estranged from each other. Needless to say, the defeat of that clause is what the Christian nationalists have been after all this time.
The response to this needs to be swift, strong, and vociferous. These Nat-Cs need to be confronted with their opposition, firmly and determinedly, and whatever goals they are seeking nipped in the bud.
Not to do so is to endanger not just those of us who are atheists, but anyone who believes differently from these radicals.
It’s why I keep saying that our constitution no longer serves us. We need a strict, definite, unambiguous, unweaselable separation of church and state. Just like we need a second amendment that talks about gun ownership being regulated, because regulation isn’t the same thing as infringement.
The Establishment Clause is already gone.
I don't agree. I think you'll find that most of the regulars here, if not all of them, don't agree. I'll guarantee you that Hemant doesn't agree.
And I think it's safe to say that we're willing to do something to defend that Establishment Clause.
It depends on which part of the country you are in. Some areas it is closer to being effectively gone, but the defense is strong. The biggest issue currently is keeping the defense down at the Appeals Court level until we can properly fix SCOTUS.
At this point we have to acknowledge that we aren't going to fix scotus and just move on. We lost that fight.
I bet your favorite song is Surrender by Cheap Trick.
It's not really a matter of what one agrees with. There are states where people are forced to follow laws that are strictly in place because of religion. Those laws were put in place very carefully, and publicly, over decades, and no secular organizations did a thing about it.
Doesn't for a moment change the fact that we will fight it. And by "we," I mean the organizations I am a member of and support, which include the Freedom From Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and the ACLU. NONE of these outfits are paper tigers, and to imply that they are shows your own ignorance.
Ok, when can we expect abortion to be fully legal, without any restrictions, throughout the entire US again? Provide a date.
These very same Republicans openly support a man who is, in essence, the biblical Antichrist.
Not just support, but actually idolize. And we know just how The Lord Jealous feels about idolatry.
Couldn't agree more. The fact that Lt. Gov. Patrick is pontificating while the most amoral being on the planet dozes off should tell us everything there is to know about how frivolous nature of this effort on the part of the evangelicals. Maybe the Christian coalition will coalesce into green algae and find a new home.
Only a cult bereft of any inherent decency or moral values needs to force a populace into compliance with its 'beliefs."
If it had any broad appeal, people would seek it out but as we have seen with the Abrahamic cults, particularly the xtian one, conversion is achieved via violence and deceit.
"But...but... we're saving their souls from an eternity in the fiery pits of Hell. A little violence and deceit is a good thing." - Smug Christian
OK, start by PROVING that we have 'immortal souls'.
Eezee-peezee. It's right there in the Bible. Jesus wouldn't lie.
Puny religion.
The people pushing to end church-state separation always seem to operate under the assumption it will be their tribe calling the shots for everyone. They also assume that inserting religion into government would make the country a better place. This casually ignores the countless horrors perpetrated in the name of religion.
Not even Mr Fantastic can stretch this far!
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1777032e44d8c307fcd81e2fefe84116bd1a63a5e62f3fb4bda91f1d57925ec0.jpg
Can you say, "Grasping at straws," boys and girls? I knew that you could!
Saw that – wondered if he was wearing a tan suit.
Presidents that have worn tan suits:
* Franklin D. Roosevelt
* Harry S. Truman
* Dwight D. Eisenhower
* John F. Kennedy
* Ronald Reagan
* George HW Bush
* Bill Clinton
* George W. Bush
* Barack Obama
We need to get someone an orange suit.
You saw Jon Stewarts montage video too?
Didn't even know it existed – but I'll look for it ta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNiqpBNE9ik
Sorry, I remembered it as being this episode but I don't see it. It is still worth a look.
Nope. No TV. Never saw it.
I can't find it now, but it was a montage of every president since Eisenhower wearing...a tan suit, just as you pointed out. In the bit I could find posted above he points out their flip-flops, bashing Obama for using a teleprompter then claiming trump was "presidential" for doing the same.
I posted about this the other day:
Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission would like to turn this country into a Christian theocracy. Their jaw dropping report and a chance for public comment can be found here:
https://www.justice.gov/religious-liberty-commission/resources?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery
OT
Been keeping my posting at a minimum because I have a busy day away from the keyboard. I hope to return sometime this afternoon
What we need is Justices who will interpret the phrase "...no religious test for office..." as NO RELIGIOUS TEST FOR OFFICE!!!!!