Freedom

It is both sad and terrifying to me that we have here any significant portion of the population that would even consider casting a vote in favor of someone in the mold of Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, but I try not to let it get to me too much because neither of these people would ever be considered electable to the office of President of the United States. But the guy that I prayed (figuratively speaking) would decide not to run, Governor Rick Perry (R-TX), appears ready to jump into the race, and he is truly a scary candidate, because he actually could win.

Even if you set everything else about Gov. Perry aside, he just looks uncomfortably like Ronald Reagan when he stands at a podium. Do we really want to relive the 1980s? It's worse than that, though...far, far worse. This is the guy who sponsored a state-wide prayer event, because God apparently looks kindly upon Texan presidential candidates (though it seemingly required a deal with the Devil to secure George W's seat in the Oval Office). Strangely, it was a calculated political move, a ploy to contrast Perry with Mitt "Book of Mormon" Romney, who is despised by the far-right wing of the GOP, and by most accounts, the event went very well for Perry--it is Texas, after all. The scary part is that the guy has enough charisma and appeal that he could be palatable to both ends of the Republican Party, and unlike Palin or Bachmann (or any other prospective opponent in the GOP), he actually has some sort of qualification: a political post that he has not abandoned, and the factual claim that his state has created more jobs than any other since the recession hit. He won't tell you that the huge majority of those jobs are of the part-time, minimum wage variety doing things like flipping burgers and running cash registers at Wal-Mart, but I guess work is work. So, on the surface Rick Perry looks downright Presidential, a legitimate challenger to Obama come November 2012, with the added bonus (for Republicans) of being less-obviously on the brink of speaking in tongues than some fellow members of his party.

But let's return, for a moment, to this day of prayer thing. We have this persistent problem in this country where some people would have us become a theocracy. We are no such thing, nor should we be. No religion should be imposed upon a person who does not want it, and no one religion should be given any kind of preference over another, or over the lack of one. It's right there in the Bill of Rights, the very first part of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In case you haven't read it, it states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

Our founding fathers, much wiser men than your average American today (or in any day), saw the very obvious danger here, and they saw that it was important enough that they made it the first fucking thing they said on the subject of American rights. And because no religion can be legally established as a preferential one, it should not be an issue that enters into politics, and it should not be an arena into which any politician should enter. Similarly, voters should not allow it to enter into the equation of who they choose to vote for. Yet, there are still an alarming number of eligible voters who would not even consider voting for someone who was not a very visible and undoubted Christian, something that Rick Perry ensured would not come into question for him. Why do we continue to allow religion to factor into our politics to such an alarming extent? If Rick Perry is a Christian, I have no problem with that, as long as he puts the well-being of his country first. I can tell you this right now, though, I cannot stomach the thought of any national days of prayer or anything like that any more than I can accept the legitimacy of a politician who claims to have received a calling from God to be President or anything else. Here in these United States, we have freedom of religion, but we also have freedom from religion.