Enough About God, Already!

Americans United for Separation of Church and State is an organization that purports to exist for the purpose of defending. well, the separation of church and state. Every now and then, however, the veil drops, and its staffers make clear that it isn’t defense of the Establishment Clause that floats their boat. What they really want is to drive religion out of the public square altogether. Jeremy Leaming does so at the AU blog by complaining about all the religion on the campaign trail:

Thanks to the ascendancy of the so-called “values voter,” the 2008 presidential campaign is filled with references to religion. As ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper recently pointed out, “You can’t spend any time on the campaign trail this year without bumping into God.”

“Values voters” should apparently keep their traps shut, and stop trying to find out what moral values move the candidates. Better yet, they shouldn’t even vote, since they pollute the public square by their very presence there. Leaming then goes on to give us several examples of presidential candidates interjecting the Almighty, or their faith in Him, into the campaign. I especially liked this one:

[Barack] Obama can’t seem to pass up a church invitation or an opportunity to expound on his Christian beliefs. Over the weekend at a rally in Columbia, S.C. with media mogul Oprah Winfrey at his side, Obama quoted scripture in telling the audience of 29,000, “Look at the day the Lord has made.”

He quoted the Bible! The horror! How any self-respecting politician can do that, without also quoting the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Avesta, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Si Shu/Wu Jing, the Book of Mormon, the Tao-te-Ching, the Gospel of Thomas and Battlefield Earth (or whatever passes for scripture in Scientology) is beyond me. Though, of course, AU would prefer that they stick to classics of literature such as the United States Code and the latest House Commerce Committee report.

Democratic front-runner [Hilary] Clinton also seems to relish shilling for votes at church. She recently took the pulpit at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., to deliver a speech intertwined with religious references.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Democratic candidate bragged that she was “fortunate enough to be raised to understand the power and purpose of prayer” and praised so-called “faith-based” charitable works. Quoting scripture, Clinton gushed, “Faith without works is dead.”

Another Bible-quoter. Who does she think she is, Abraham Lincoln?

Are Obama and Clinton (and, for that matter, Edwards, Romney, Huckabee, Guiliani, Thompson, and McCain) pandering to religious voters when they do stuff like this? Of course they are. That’s not to say they aren’t sincere in their beliefs, but that they are doing what all politicians do–speaking to voters about what concerns them using a language with which  the voters resonate. Apparently, in AU’s view, pols are free to do that for everyone except religious voters, whom they must speak to in strictly secular language, lest they…lest they…well, lest they do whatever it is that they supposed to be doing.

Leaming concludes by quoting the boss:

To some Americans, this is all too much. On the religion and politics blog of PBS’s “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly,” Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn has challenged the increasing amount of religion on the campaign trail.

“There’s vastly too much discussion about God and religion and the candidates in this election cycle,” he said. “And it really doesn’t get Americans to know two important things – are the candidates competent and what specific principles will they use to guide their policies?”

Lynn was not advocating for the candidates to put aside their religious beliefs. The ordained United Church of Christ minister and long-time civil rights activist, however, did say he looked forward to the day when candidates would not drag religion onto the campaign trail and not suggest that there’s a religious test for public office in America.

There’s not.

And guess what? No one has ever suggested there is. Since AU is so on fire about protecting the Constitution, maybe staffers should read it. The prohibition on religious tests in Article VI prohibits the government from requiring a particular religious profession in order to hold public office. It says nothing whatsoever about the standards by which voters may or may not judge political candidates. If some voters make up their minds that the only people they’ll vote for are heretical Druids (they worship bushes, not trees), they can do that. I have no doubt that in San Francisco, some have decided exactly that.

What’s really pathetic is that Lynn, a United Church of Christ clergyman, would make a statement  saying that references to God and religion don’t tell us “what specific principles will they use to guide their policies.” In fact, those references, or the lack thereof, may tell us a great deal about the persons involved. But maybe in the circles in which he travels, religious faith really doesn’t tell you anything about a person’s guiding principles.

Anti-Humanism of the New Religion

You’ve heard this line before, and you’re going to hear about it a lot more in the years to come from the anti-humanist elements of the new environmental religion. From the Australian News:

A West Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus “baby levy” at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

Writing in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child’s lifetime.

I wonder where he proposes to put them. Much of Australia is a desert, and I’d be willing to bet planting trees at the rate he’s talking about will result in the entire rest of the country being covered with firewood within a decade.

Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and “greenhouse-friendly” services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.

And he implied the Federal Government should ditch the $4133 baby bonus and consider population controls like those in China and India.

By all means–turn Australia into a totalitarian society like China. By the way, you forgot mandatory abortion, the sacrament of the new religion.

Professor Walters said the average annual carbon dioxide emission by an Australian individual was about 17 metric tons, including energy use.

“Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society,” he wrote.

“Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a ‘baby levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.”

“People are polluters” simply by virtue of living. There’s a catchy slogan. By the way, do you suppose it ever occurs to people like Walters that by his standards (“not simply by breathing”), every animal on the planet is a “polluter,” since they all–birds, lizards, rhinoceroses, cockroaches–breath out carbon dioxide. True, it’s not on the same scale as humans per capita, but but for every human, there are millions of insects, and probably hundreds or thousands of birds. When you add up numbers, there may be more greenhouse gases coming out of the world’s woodpeckers than out of the whole city of Sydney. And of course, it has been demonstrated that cattle produce more greenhouse gases than than all human transportation activities (the “livestock sector” produces “65 per cent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2,” according to the UN). Sounds like it’s time to turn loose the world’s hunters and Terminex men. And we should all eat a lot more real food for real people, to cut down in the amount of methane being spewed into the atmosphere. We can deal with the babies later.

Australian Family Association spokeswoman Angela Conway said it was ridiculous to blame babies for global warming.

“I think self-important professors with silly ideas should have to pay carbon tax for all the hot air they create,” she said. “There’s masses of evidence to say that child-rich families have much lower resource consumption per head than other styles of households.

I like the idea of a hot air tax. Imagine how much government revenue Al Gore alone could produce in a year.

But the plan won praise from high-profile doctor Garry Egger. “One must wonder why population control is spoken of today only in whispers,” he wrote in an MJA response article.

Probably because “population control,” for most people, conjures up images of a totalitarian regime regulating one of the most basic of human instincts for the sake of a mystical anti-human ideology that repels the vast majority of people. But that’s just a guess.