Heiress Harris Erras

From Shortcuts in Thursday's Star Tribune:

"Over time, that lie we have been told -- the separation of
church and state -- people have internalized, thinking that they needed
to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who
chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in
electing those godly men and women and if people aren't involved in
helping godly men in getting elected then we're going to have a nation
of secular laws."

-- Florida Republican U.S. Senate candidate and
U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris (made famous in the 2000 presidential
recount as Florida's then-secretary of state), Florida Baptist Witness,
Aug. 24.

Earth to Katherine Harris: we do have a nation of secular laws. The people make them, not God. They bring all kinds of ideas, obviously, with them when they go to the polls or sit in the legislatures or congress, but the people make the law.

You can't, at least not yet, be charged with a violation of Leviticus or Deuteronomy. There may be some man-made law based on notions of morality derived from some things in these two books that you can be charged with, but that's fundamentally different.

It is a dangerous abdication of democracy to assert that we should be governed - as a matter of state control - by a group of religious fanatics.

The separation of church and state is a constitutional doctrine we got from the Enlightenment thinkers in Virginia and the Constitutional Congress. It is demagoguery of the purest and rankest order to call it a lie.

And that goes for you, too, Mary Kiffmeyer.



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