From left to right: Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz. Not pictured: Bobby Jindal and Rand Paul. |
Update. More hedging than I thought. Most GOP candidates say "she should follow the law, but it should be possible to not follow the law, maybe." Gutsy!
For all I know, there are other GOP candidates for president that are also in the newly assembled Neanderthal Caucus on religious rights. It's hard to say what any of them believe, or purport to believe, at any one time.
Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Scott Walker all took up recalcitrant Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis' cause against gay marriage. And there's Bobby Jindal, who's running for the Most Christian Indian Ever as well as for president. I'd quote him, but you'd bust too much of a gut. Okay, he said God created America or something. That's pretty Neanderthal.
The rest of the GOP field says nothing or jumbles up a sort of what-the-fuck-did-he-say response. Lindsey Graham and Carly Fiorina seemed to straight-ahead say follow the law, dammit. Even Antonin Scalia is on the record saying, "I don't care if it's your religion, peyote is illegal, so knock it off!"
I shouldn't have to explain it, but here's the deal: the First Amendment doesn't guarantee religious freedom per se. It says in order to guarantee freedom to follow your religion, the State chooses not to choose a religion. Get it? "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or the free exercise thereof." Therefore, in the context of the State, there is no religion.
So Kim Davis, private citizen, can do her religion, as long as it harms no one, supposedly even herself. (She can't say, "My religion says I can shoot myself in the head, so I'm free to do it."). But Kim Davis, as representative of the State, is not free to let her religion, which is not established by the State, trump laws enacted by the State.
This has been established law for a long time -- hell, it was made clear back in the time of the founding fathers -- and shouldn't be a mystery to any American, except willfully ignorant or manipulative ones.
Thus those who believe otherwise are definitely Neanderthals. So, stay the hell out of government.
I might as well add that religion is superstition and, from my perspective, totally blows hard. So it's no wonder I have little sympathy for those who live in the past, like the way, way past.
How much longer is this obsession with Moses and Issac and Abraham and all the other people that actually like totally knew God back in the day, I'm mean how much longer, huh, is this going to go on? I guess here in modern-day 21st-century America we're just getting warmed up. Sheesh...
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