Jacksonville, Florida has given us our most recent example why the separation of church and state is so important. After the Mayor of Jacksonville nominated a Muslim professor, Parvez Ahmed, to the city's Human Rights Commission some of the city council members had issues not with his human rights record but with his religious record.
During a city council meeting which of course started with a Christian prayer, Professor Ahmed was asked to come up and pray to his god. Before you ask, "is that it?" as if that isn't enough, he was given a questionnaire.
The campaign to deny Ahmed confirmation heated up a couple of weeks ago when one of First Baptist’s members of the Council, Clay Yarborough, sent a questionnaire to Ahmed (and another nominee) soliciting views on such topics as gay rights and the appropriateness of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and on money. There had never been such a questionnaire for nominees before, and the questions had no obvious connection to the role of a commissioner.
Can you imagine how belittling it would be to be asked to show how you pray like some carnival side show? What business is it of the city council? Did they think it would be embarrassing for Amahd should he throw down a prayer rug and start reciting prayers from the Koran? Or were they only curious about how "they" do it?
Now why do you think Councilman Yarborough asked about "under god" and IGWT? It's because he can point to that as proof that this is a Christian nation that our government is founded on Christian principles and thus Christians are the preferred citizen. It is evident when Councilman Yarborough "admitted in interviews that he wasn’t sure Muslims (or gays and lesbians) should hold public office and that while prayers should “absolutely” be allowed in public buildings, only prayers said in the “name of Jesus Christ” are appropriate."
That pretty much ends the argument about what god "under God" and IGWT refers to. It also makes their justifications that "it can be any god" ring completely hollow. They are empty words to trick us into allowing them to continue to exercise special rights that are denied to non-Christians.
I have long echoed the notion that our Constitution won't die from a single mortal blow but rather by numerous seemingly insignificant wounds. When "under God" was added, it invited IGWT onto our money which invited "So Help Me God" to be added to our military oaths, which invited the Office of Faith Based Initiatives and now an openly religious test to hold office all justified by every single "minor" transgression that came before.
When Sarah Palin says our laws are based on the Ten Commandments and the Bible and questions the existence of the wall of separation between church and state and goes almost completely unchallenged it continues to build on the credibility that this is a Christian nation and that our laws should be based on the Bible.
The fact that someone like Palin isn't run out of town on a rail for saying something so ludicrous is evidence that there are a lot of people that believe her. In other words, she isn't completely out of the main stream, unfortunately.
We really only have two choices at this point. Continue to allow this slide toward a full blown theocracy where the laws are in fact based on the Bible or we must put the bricks back in the wall of separation that we have allowed to be removed.
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