That is the message behind ten billboard advertisements in Florida that are attacking the separation of church and state; the Community Issues Council (CIC) has funded the billboards advertisements in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times, Terry Kemple, the president and sole employee of the CIC, claims that there is a national necessity for Christian governance.
However, the billboard featured in the St. Petersburg article attributes a completely false quote to President George Washington: “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” While the newspaper characterized the quote as “fictional attribution” and Kemple does not believe that there is a “document in Washington's handwriting that has those words in that specific form,” the billboard itself directly attributes the quote to Washington.
The billboards have not gone unchallenged; there is an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Tribune by J. Brent Walker which thoroughly debunks the “false claims and misleading assertions about our country's history and commitment to religious freedom.” However, thousands if not millions of people will read those billboards and many will take the misleading attributions as fact.
The web site for NoSeparation.org, which is listed on the billboards, claims that “the quotes and the historical references on the pages of NoSeparation.org immediately disprove the ‘separation of church and state’ lie.” Ironically the first and most prominent quote listed on the web site is the fictional and quote falsely attributed to George Washington. The other quote prominently displayed on the web site, “…this is a Christian nation,” is from the 1892 Supreme Court decision of Church of Holy Trinity v. United States; another case decide by the Supreme Court just four years later found that “equal, but separate, accommodations” for blacks and white where Constitutional. I am left to wonder if Kemple would agree with the Supreme Court’s decision on Plessey v. Ferguson, or if he would agree that society must progress and discard the beliefs that are no longer acceptable.
There is another interesting quote that can be found on NoSeparation.org; a quote by President John Adams which states that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” That quote is particularly interesting because President Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, which stated that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
The Texas Freedom Network also points out that NoSeparation.org also links to “SBOE ‘expert’ David Barton’s Wallbuilders.com as a “fantastic resource for information on America’s Christian heritage.” The same “expert” that believes that the separation of church and state is a “myth” and that the United States laws should be based on fundamentalist Christian biblical principles and the same “expert” who wants to remove historical figures such as César Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from the social studies curriculum for public education.
America is not a Christian nation; America is a collection of people that believe that everyone has the right to have faith in any religion or not to have faith in any religion. Many of the men that founding this country were of the Christian faith and many of them were not, and many of these same white, landowning, men owned slaves and believed that they held dominion over land in which Native Americans lived. However, our future is not simply dictated by our past, and we cannot pick and chose the pieces of history that we wish to remember. For those that would like to see the Christian religion dominate our democracy, I ask them which version of Christianity would they choose?
The billboards have not gone unchallenged; there is an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Tribune by J. Brent Walker which thoroughly debunks the “false claims and misleading assertions about our country's history and commitment to religious freedom.” However, thousands if not millions of people will read those billboards and many will take the misleading attributions as fact.
The web site for NoSeparation.org, which is listed on the billboards, claims that “the quotes and the historical references on the pages of NoSeparation.org immediately disprove the ‘separation of church and state’ lie.” Ironically the first and most prominent quote listed on the web site is the fictional and quote falsely attributed to George Washington. The other quote prominently displayed on the web site, “…this is a Christian nation,” is from the 1892 Supreme Court decision of Church of Holy Trinity v. United States; another case decide by the Supreme Court just four years later found that “equal, but separate, accommodations” for blacks and white where Constitutional. I am left to wonder if Kemple would agree with the Supreme Court’s decision on Plessey v. Ferguson, or if he would agree that society must progress and discard the beliefs that are no longer acceptable.There is another interesting quote that can be found on NoSeparation.org; a quote by President John Adams which states that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” That quote is particularly interesting because President Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, which stated that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
The Texas Freedom Network also points out that NoSeparation.org also links to “SBOE ‘expert’ David Barton’s Wallbuilders.com as a “fantastic resource for information on America’s Christian heritage.” The same “expert” that believes that the separation of church and state is a “myth” and that the United States laws should be based on fundamentalist Christian biblical principles and the same “expert” who wants to remove historical figures such as César Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from the social studies curriculum for public education.
America is not a Christian nation; America is a collection of people that believe that everyone has the right to have faith in any religion or not to have faith in any religion. Many of the men that founding this country were of the Christian faith and many of them were not, and many of these same white, landowning, men owned slaves and believed that they held dominion over land in which Native Americans lived. However, our future is not simply dictated by our past, and we cannot pick and chose the pieces of history that we wish to remember. For those that would like to see the Christian religion dominate our democracy, I ask them which version of Christianity would they choose?
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2 comments:
theres nothing christian about intolerance, including for people of other belief systems.
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hears my voice, and open the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me." (Revelation 3:20)
These people are giant hypocrites. As the previous quote says, a PERSON much CHOOSE the faith, not forced into it. Jesus never used force to push is message, why should we as a nation? Christianity in the political and governmental sphere of influence completely negates its message and meaning.
The Christians that settled parts of the US were escaping a government that persecuted their religious beliefs. Should we now do the same to another faith? or even to another sect of Christianity that may not have the same beliefs as the majority? We are supposed to be the land of the Free.
If they were ever successful in their endeavor to make this a Christian nation, this is what would happen. To some, the US will have selected the wrong Christian faith to follow and these people will feel disallusioned therefore all of them will get on a ship and starting a colony in the New World, the Moon. Then in another 300 years this same discussion will be repeated with a colony of Christians moving to Mars, and so on and so on.
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