"... the Republican courtship of the religious right and its fear of giving offense to Christian fundamentalists are [sic] pervasive."

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COMMENTS:
*  Politicians who deny basic science, i.e. evolution, are either not equipped intellectually to be president or are pandering to the lowest common denominator of their base. I will never vote for someone who is intellectually dishonest or ignorant of basic facts staring them in the face.
*  ... I would love to see a man or woman elected President of the United States who openly states that God's will is irrelevant in matters of public policy. It is a empty justification used to deny rights, deny the common good, and deny the diffusion of political power.
*  What we most object to are faux-politicians invoking " Gawwwwd " in campaigns/book-signing tours that seem chiefly calculated to enrich " their ownselves ", as if any type activity is justifiable, as long as " Gawwwwwd " is shouted.  In truth, everyone realizes religion is the last refuge of those who have run out of reasons to justify a course of action; debate is over once one side's only remaining argument point is " I believe ".
*  It is my fondest hope that someday a person's religion/belief/faith becomes strictly a private matter -- no longer a subject of public discourse, no longer paraded and flaunted, no longer a litmus test for and by the sanctimonious. No more National Prayer Breakfasts, no more TV debates about the existence of deities, no more court cases about religious symbols in public places or prayer in schools, no more legislation to declare the Bible the Official State Book of Kentucky (or anywhere else). Everybody stops yelling and squabbling about this topic, respects each other's right to believe or not to, and stops judging anyone on this basis. A miracle most welcome.
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Too Much Prayer in Politics
Republicans, the Religious Right and Evolution
By Frank Bruni, February 14, 2015

GOD had a busy week. Alabama alone was a heavy lift, what with all those God invocations by state leaders trying to cast out the demon of gay marriage, then London called as well. Scott Walker was on a trip there, and he tugged God into the picture when he was asked about evolution and declined to answer, as if embracing it would be a heathen outrage.

In a subsequent tweet, Walker insisted that there wasn’t any conflict between “faith & science,” which, he wrote, “go hand in hand.”

That’s debatable. This isn’t: Faith and government shouldn’t be as cozy as they are in this country. Politicians in general, and Republicans in particular, shouldn’t genuflect as slavishly as they do, not in public. They’re vying to be senators and presidents. They’re not auditioning to be ministers and missionaries.

No one told that to Rick Perry as he ramped up for the 2012 presidential race and gave God a workout to be remembered. I’ve certainly never forgotten it. He was then the governor of Texas, and in April 2011, as wildfires ravaged the state, he signed a gubernatorial proclamation denoting one 72-hour period as the Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.

The following month, reflecting on the array of problems confronting America, he said, “I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this.’ ” And three months after that, he gathered some 30,000 people, most of them evangelical Christians, in a Houston stadium for an event called The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis.

As Manny Fernandez noted in his coverage of that rally in The Times, Perry used “his office’s prestige, letterhead, Web site and other resources to promote it.” I don’t see much of a separation of church and state there.

Remarkably, none of this was a drag on his aspirations for the Oval Office, not at all. He remained a serious contender for his party’s nomination until a debate performance that was less than celestial sent him tumbling to earth.

Faith is a serious matter, and an important one, but it’s trivialized when it’s toted too readily and stridently into the political arena.

And while a creed can rightly be a personal compass, it’s wrongly deployed as marching orders or a governing strategy. Politicians’ religions — and I use the plural on purpose, because there’s no one religion that gets to trump the others — should be a source of their strength and of their empathy, not of their agendas.

But that’s not the way it works out in this country, especially not among Republicans, who can’t quit their fealty to the religious right and who, because of that, drive away many independent voters who are otherwise receptive to an ideology of limited government, personal responsibility and muscular foreign policy.

These voters just can’t stomach all the moralizing that comes with that ideology. They can’t take the placement of divinity above Darwin.

And there’s a heavy dose of divinity.

Mike Huckabee, who is an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist church, put God in the title of a new book that he wrote and just released on the cusp of what may be another presidential bid. He ran previously in 2008, when he won the Iowa caucuses.

The book is called “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.” These are a few of his favorite things.

During a recent appearance on a Christian TV program, he explained that he was mulling a 2016 campaign because America had lost sight of its identity as a “God-centered nation that understands that our laws do not come from man, they come from God.” The way he talks, the Constitution is a set of tablets hauled down from a mountaintop by a bearded prophet.

He later added that “the only thing worse than not being elected president would be to be elected president without God’s blessing. I can’t think of a worse place in the world to be than in the Oval Office without God’s hand upon you.”

Last week he injected religion into politics in a different way, recalling President Obama’s recent reference to the Crusades and questioning the president’s respect for Christianity. Huckabee said that Muslims are “the one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support.”

That’s ugly and absurd. While I agree that Obama’s digression into history was ill-timed and unnecessary, I’m offended by Huckabee’s extrapolation.

Huckabee is an extreme case within his party, but the Republican courtship of the religious right and its fear of giving offense to Christian fundamentalists are pervasive. Republican presidential candidates, even relatively moderate ones, run from the subject of evolution as if it were a ticking bomb. And they routinely polish their religious bona fides.

But we should be wary of politicians who are too eager to talk of religion, which is an easy rallying cry and, frequently, a diversion or even a disguise. It can cover up private misdeeds.

It can put a rosy glow on political calculations. Obama, for example, framed his past opposition to gay marriage as a deeply personal matter of faith. But as David Axelrod’s new book, “Believer,” makes clear, it was a deeply expedient matter of evading some voters’ wrath. He more or less supported gay marriage, at least when he was away from the podium, all along.

We should be even warier of politicians and other leaders who wrap policy in dogma, claiming holy guidance. That’s a dangerous road to take. At the far, bitter end of it lie theocracies and brutal extremists.

We should listen hard to what’s being said in Alabama, where opponents of gay marriage aren’t merely asserting that it runs counter to what Alabamians want. They’re declaring that it perverts God’s will, which was the position that some racists took about integration.

Last week, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party wrote that the state would “reap God’s wrath if we embrace and condone things that are abhorrent to God, such as redefining marriage.”

And in an interview with the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore — the man who once put up a granite monument to the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial System building — said, “Our rights, contained in the Bill of Rights, do not come from the Constitution, they come from God.”

“That’s your faith,” Cuomo replied. “But that’s not our country.”

Cuomo’s right, and God should be given a rest. Even in Genesis he got one.
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