"What he is trying to say is 'I am a person of faith. Forget the fact what my faith is, that I am a Mormon. You might be Christian. You might be Jewish. I'm a person of faith. I believe in God,' " Martin said.
Romney said religion is essential to freedom, without pointing to any specific faith.
"Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone," the GOP contender said.
I hate this. I hate that Romney feels comfortable telling a significant portion of the population -- including many of my friends -- is incapable of grasping or maintaining freedom. I hate that he'll probably get wonderful coverage of his speech anyway. I hate that Romney was compelled to give this speech because certain people don't think his religious creed is suitable to lead America, and I hate that he decided to pander to that group rather than repudiate them. I hate that, insofar as it plays into things at all, excluding atheists from the American creed will probably give him a bump in the polls. I hate how it forces my religiosity into a state of conflict with my irreligious peers.
It's sickening to me.
I have friends who are Jewish, and I have friends who are Christian. I have friends who are Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist and Animist and atheist, and friends who are still deciding. All of them understand the blessing of liberty. All of them know the meaning of respect, and dignity, and morality, and freedom. They are righteous individuals to a person, regardless of creed. And I speak as someone who does believe that we all carry a spark of the divine in them -- you do not insult my peers, my colleagues, my friends, and do it under the banner of religious freedom. That slanders the name of religion and poisons my faith.
Don't despair too much that he'll get wonderful coverage; the WaPo editorial page has slammed him on exactly the grounds you mention. Amusingly, this is next to Charles Krauthammer's op-ed about how one certainly ought to believe in some kind of supernaturalness (whether Jeffersonian Providence, Washingtonian Great Author or Lincoln's Almight), but by gosh Huckabee's referring to himself as a Christian leader is just wrong.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you have a friend who is an Animist? Cool.
I have a girlfriend who is an animist, actually :-).
ReplyDeleteAgreed. The greatest unnoticed miracle of modern tolerance has been the healing (mostly) of divides between fundamentalists of various sects of the Christian religion. Sadly, though, the end result seems to have been a more unified voice to be intolerant of the rest.
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