Rhetorical Outbursts

The Roberts hearings began yesterday. It started at noon and took all day just to get through the opening statements. I was puzzled by this section of Sen. Feinstein’s statement on the separation of church and state (only a part of which she had time to read aloud):

I recently traveled to Europe where I saw monuments enshrining the tragedies that have ocurred [sic] in the name of religion. In Budapest along the River Danube there are 60 pairs of shoes covered in copper: women’s, men’s, small children’s.

During World War II, Hungarian fascist and Nazi soldiers forced thousands of Jews including men, women and small children to remove their shoes, as a final humiliation, before shooting them and letting their bodies fall and drift down the river. These shoes represent a powerful symbol of man’s inhumanity.

Excuse me! In the name of religion? On what planet are fascism and Nazism religious ideologies? Not here on earth, Senator Feinstein. They were nationalist ideologies. Nazism was explicitly anti-Christian as well. The tendency of the left to blame “religion,” in general, for so many evils never ceases to amaze me — even when there is no plausible basis for it. And Senator Feinstein is actually the more conservative Democrat in the California delegation.

More from her prepared statement:

And we cannot forget that in American history, Puritans, Baptists, Catholics, Jews and other religious individuals came to this continent looking for a society where they could be free from the persecution they faced in Europe and England.

In response, the Founding Fathers created a balance in the Constitution that provided for freedom of worship as well as for separation of church and state. In their efforts to protect against religious persecution, the framers established a secular government that would remain separate from religion.

No. They did not establish a secular government. As discussed here, the word secular means “indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations.”

What the founders created is a pluralist government, “in which members of diverse ethnic, racial, religious, or social groups maintain an autonomous participation in and development of their traditional culture or special interest within the confines of a common civilization.”