''Reason Before Religion''

Devoted Deaniac Jackie Minchew passes this along to focus on the issue of how the Democrats should relate to communities of faith: "It has become an article of faith among many leading Democrats that they lost the 2004 election because their party and its candidates were considered “too secular” and too removed from the “moral values” cherished by a majority of American voters. According to this credo, Democrats, to regain the White House, must adopt a strategy of fighting fire with fire -- presenting socially progressive religious values as an alternative to the right-wing religious ethos so forcefully articulated by President George W. Bush. Americans are to be convinced that God himself is displeased by the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the rich, its war in Iraq, and a host of other initiatives that the Republican religious right has cast in its image of the deity.

If the advocates of faith-based campaigning have their way -- and there is good reason to fear that they will, given the Democrats’ panic at the election results -- it could mean nothing less than the end of the American experiment as we have known it since 1789. If Democrats opt to place an irresolvable conflict of biblical interpretation front and center in politics, they would be turning their backs, as Republicans have already done, on the genius of the first secular Constitution in the world -- and on the Framers who shocked the religious rightists of their day by deliberately omitting any mention of a deity, instead ceding supreme governmental authority to “We the People.”-from the humanists of north puget sound site.