Billboards, Presidents, and the Separation of Church and State

by: liberaltexan

Tue Aug 04, 2009 at 06:03 PM CDT

"America's government was made only for people who are moral and religious."

That is the message behind ten billboard advertisements in Florida that are attacking the separation of church and state; the Community Issues Council (CIC) has funded the billboards advertisements in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times, Terry Kemple, the president and sole employee of the CIC, claims that there is a national necessity for Christian governance.

However, the billboard featured in the St. Petersburg article attributes a completely false quote to President George Washington: "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible." While the newspaper characterized the quote as "fictional attribution" and Kemple does not believe that there is a "document in Washington's handwriting that has those words in that specific form," the billboard itself directly attributes the quote to Washington.

The billboards have not gone unchallenged; there is an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Tribune by J. Brent Walker which thoroughly debunks the "false claims and misleading assertions about our country's history and commitment to religious freedom." However, thousands if not millions of people will read those billboards and many will take the misleading attributions as fact.

More Below the Fold...

There is another interesting quote that can be found on NoSeparation.org; a quote by President John Adams which states that "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people." That quote is particularly interesting because President Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, which stated that:

"the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

The Texas Freedom Network also points out that NoSeparation.org also links to "SBOE 'expert' David Barton's Wallbuilders.com as a "fantastic resource for information on America's Christian heritage." The same "expert" that believes that the separation of church and state is a "myth" and that the United States laws should be based on fundamentalist Christian biblical principles and the same "expert" who wants to remove historical figures such as César Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from the social studies curriculum for public education.

America is not a Christian nation; America is a collection of people that believe that everyone has the right to have faith in any religion or not to have faith in any religion. Many of the men that founding this country were of the Christian faith and many of them were not, and many of these same white, landowning, men owned slaves and believed that they held dominion over land in which Native Americans lived. However, our future is not simply dictated by our past, and we cannot pick and chose the pieces of history that we wish to remember. For those that would like to see the Christian religion dominate our democracy, I ask them which version of Christianity would they choose?

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