{"id":56621,"date":"2024-02-23T01:52:13","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T01:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=56621"},"modified":"2024-02-23T01:52:13","modified_gmt":"2024-02-23T01:52:13","slug":"we-are-a-secular-government-dammit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=56621","title":{"rendered":"We are a &#8216;secular government,&#8217; dammit!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n\r\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">I keep hearing about how U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson cloaks himself in the New Testament, about how he is pushing the doctrine of &#8220;Christian nationalism.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nSigh &#8230;\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nI want to remind the speaker and those who adhere to his reported view of how government should function of this irrefutable fact: <em>You won&#8217;t find the word &#8220;God&#8221; anywhere in the U.S. Constitution<\/em>. Why is that? Because the men who wrote it consciously avoided using such language because they had fled religious oppression in Europe.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThey wrote a secular document that establishes that human beings should determine our laws and that they should not be influenced by a specific religion. Yes, I am talking about Christianity.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThe founders established in Article VI that there must be &#8220;no religious test&#8221; to determine who should run for public office. The First Amendment to the Constitution lays out a number of civil liberties that deserve protection from government interference; the first one of them is religion, as the amendment declares that &#8220;Congress shall make no law&#8221; that establishes a state religion.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nSpeaker Johnson needs to put a sock in his proclamation of faith. It is admirable that he is a man of strong faith. That is as far he should go, and he must end this rhetoric that attaches references to God to legislation enacted by fallible men and women.\r\n\r\n\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I keep hearing about how U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson cloaks himself in the New Testament, about how he is pushing the doctrine of &#8220;Christian nationalism.&#8221; Sigh &#8230; I want to remind the speaker and those who adhere to his reported view of how government should function of this irrefutable fact: You won&#8217;t find the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=56621\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">We are a &#8216;secular government,&#8217; dammit!<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,15],"tags":[1138,1738,7419,10318],"class_list":["post-56621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","category-political-news","category-religious-news","tag-constitution","tag-first-amendment","tag-maga","tag-religious-oppression"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56621"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56622,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56621\/revisions\/56622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}