This just buckles my knees. Poached from chromatic_dawn over on – Jim Towey, the White House Deputy Assistant to the President and Director, Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, actually SAYS this:

“I haven’t run into a pagan faith-based group yet, much less a pagan group that cares for the poor! Once you make it clear to any applicant that public money must go to public purposes and can’t be used to promote ideology, the fringe groups lose interest. Helping the poor is tough work and only those with loving hearts seem drawn to it.”

Short of passing a law requiring everybody to join Dubya’s church, how much closer to the official establishment of religion are we going to get?

There has been much gnashing of teeth and tearing at hair lately among progressives trying to figure out how to reform the Democratic Party so that it can actually win an election. A lot of the thinking says they have to find a way to talk about faith and god like the GOP does, and some are holding out the Salazar boys from Colorado as a good example of how this is done.

Yeah, I guess so. But here’s another idea: how about we take the damned Constitution at its word and start thinking of the chapel and the capitol building as DIFFERENT THINGS?! Let’s make a deal – no Bible study in gummit and no economic policy debates in church. I’m all for people having their faith and letting it guide their lives. That’s great. But the framers of the Constitution established a secular government and they did it for a reason.

One of these days the jesusmongers might find out that it was done to PROTECT them. They might find it out the hard way, too….