The most unpopular people in Madison this time of the year have got to be the folks who operate the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
They've taken it upon themselves, most notably through their leader Annie Laurie Gaylor, to police religious symbols and observances on government property, insisting that to invoke religion in places that belong to all the people is a usurpation of the Founding Fathers' insistence that church and state be separate. They sue to get Nativity scenes removed from municipal parks and demand that evergreen trees displayed in state capitols be called something other than a Christmas tree.
I don't always agree with the tactics the group uses. Often, it needs to choose its targets more selectively instead of using a shotgun when a rifle would do. But, judging from the letters I read and the e-mails I get, many people completely misunderstand the organization's motives.
Far as I know, neither Gaylor nor any of her colleagues in the foundation are opposed to religious observances or symbols. What churches, people or businesses do on their own property is perfectly fine with them. Yet they unfairly get blamed when a business takes it upon itself to wish folks a happy holiday instead of Merry Christmas, perhaps out of deference to its customers of varied faiths.
What the Freedom From Religion Foundation people do object to -- in fact, what most Americans, including those with devout religious beliefs, ought to object to -- is when public property and resources are used to push a religious cause.
Although a surprising number of people believe so -- perhaps they missed that part during American history classes -- the United States was not founded as a Christian nation. We're not Saudi Arabia, Iran or any of the many other countries that do, indeed, have a state-sponsored religion. That's a difference that even Mitt Romney, the Mormon who is running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, doesn't understand.
Last week in his much ballyhooed press conference to explain how his Mormonism won't dictate how he acts as president, he claimed that "our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people."
No, Mitt, it wasn't. The U.S. Constitution contains not one word in favor of religion.
As columnist Steve Chapman pointed out in the Chicago Tribune last Sunday, John Adams, who was instrumental in putting together that Constitution, stipulated in a 1796 treaty he signed as president that the United States government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Further, the national charter says that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office."
Many of those original Americans ran away from Europe because they were told how to worship. They came here to worship as they pleased -- or to not worship at all if that's how they felt. Government could just keep its nose out.
And that's as it should be. Every American is free to be just as Christian or Jewish or Muslim or agnostic or atheist as he or she likes. Those who contend candidates need to pass a religious test or that city halls ought to display Merry Christmas banners or a Nativity scene quite frankly don't understand the principles on which this country was founded.
There are too many countries in this world, after all, that do demand religious obedience on the part of their leaders and their people. Last I looked they have terrible track records dealing with their neighbors or the rest of the world.
There's nothing politically correct about supporting the separation of church and state. It's simply what it has always meant to be an American.
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