“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.” — Mitt Romney, December 6, 2007
Fifteen percent of the population of the United States self-identifies as atheist or agnostic. That’s more than any religious affiliation except Roman Catholics and Baptists, and almost ten times as many people as there are members of Romney’s own Mormon church. And yet, in the process of justifying his own sectarian beliefs, even as he used the words “no religious test” as they apply to running for public office, he still managed to verbally invalidate the inalienable rights of millions of Americans by implying the existence of just such a test to discriminate between believers and non-believers. This Washington Post editorial this morning quite rightly chastises Romney for the implication, all too commonly repeated, that non-believers are somehow less deserving of essential liberty.
It is hypocritical to assert that HIS religious faith is irrelevant to his ability to serve as President while simultaneously asserting that those without religion are not welcome in the halls of government or in the land of freedom itself. Religious affiliation should indeed be utterly irrelevant to the qualifications of any individual to serve at any level of government. The foundations of American governance make no provision for religion whatsoever and in fact go out of their way to PREVENT religion from playing a role in the practical business of democracy. The separation of church and state exists to protect each from one another.
I can only echo the words and thoughts of this blogger as he says:
Although he addressed the speech to all Americans, he was not talking to me when he gave this speech. Romney made it perfectly clear that as President he would represent non-believers like me with reluctance at best. We do not fit into his idea of Americans; we are an after-thought.
If the two political parties in this country are headed towards the conclusion that, as an atheist, I am not a true American, then my family and I will, in effect, be sent into political exile. For me (as for the ancient Athenians, who also valued political partipation as a part of the core of a person’s identity), exile robs life of its meaning.
Romney, unwittingly or not, for reasons of political expediency or not, threatened me with political — and therefore, for a non-believer, spiritual — exile in his speech today.
How dare Mitt Romney and others like him stand before the entire nation and disqualify me and millions more like me on the basis of the very sort of intolerance that the founders of this nation sought to banish? His “I’m not one of THEM, I’m one of YOU” speech smacks of cowardice and craven appeasement. He should be ashamed to present himself as a qualified candidate for the country’s highest office if he cannot wholeheartedly represent the interests of ALL the people rather than those he seeks to side with out of political expedience. And the same holds true for each and every candidate of both parties, indeed each and every candidate for any public office in the United States.
In 1960, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy rose to address the issue of his own religious belief as it related to his ability to perform the duties of president, he said these words:
Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end – where all men and all churches are treated as equal – where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice [my emphasis] – where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind – and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe – a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the Nation or imposed by the Nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.
I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would, our system of checks and balances permit him to do so – and neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test – even by indirection – for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it.
I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none – who can attend any ceremony, service, or dinner his office may appropriately require of him – and whose fulfillment of his Presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation.
This is the kind of America I believe in – and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we might have a “divided loyalty,” that we did “not believe in liberty” or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the “freedoms for which our forefathers died.”
To borrow from the late Lloyd Bentsen, you are no John Kennedy, Mr. Romney.
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