Our doorbell rang one evening last week, and a winsome young man urged my wife and me to support his candidate for state legislature. We asked, “what are your candidate’s goals?” His reply, “he wants to bring Christian values to the legislature.” We asked, “is that how the Constitution describes the duty of a legislator?”
The young man seemed baffled, perhaps not having considered it before. We thanked him for dropping by, and my parting comment was, “you might want to run that question by your candidate.”
When a person with these goals is elected to the Oklahoma Legislature or Congress, we citizens are poorly served. We seem to be electing more and more people like this, whose loyalty is more to a fundamentalist Christian agenda than to the Constitution, which says in Article 6: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” And which states in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
I’m certainly not against religion. I’ve served as an ordained minister for fifty years, but we and our candidates need to understand a lot better the marvelous Constitution bequeathed to us which allows religion and government its own separate turf, and doesn’t allow one to manipulate or undermine the other, which is happening right now. As someone said recently, “the elected official places his or her hand on the Bible, swearing to uphold the Constitution, not the other way around.”
BILL MOORER
Muskogee
Opinion
June 22, 2012
THE PEOPLE SPEAK – Religion should not be goal of legislators
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