Editor, Times-Dispatch: I admire Del. Donald McEachin. We share a belief in the omnipresence of God. I do not know why you would choose the occasion of his furthering his religious education to take a jab at a fine organization, Americans United for Separation of Church and State.   Your suggestion that groups such as AU “stand poised to pounce on any perceived transgression of the wall between faith and public policy” went well beyond hyperbole. There is a big difference between the separation of church and state that is required by the Constitution and separating faith from public policy, which would be impossible.

The purpose of AU is to protect the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. In this AU members attempt to follow in the footsteps of three great Virginians: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason.

W Young. richmond.

It was fascinating to read how his spiritual pursuits have changed his political ones. As reporter Pamela Stallsmith’s article on McEachin noted:

“His theological studies have reshaped his political outlook. For instance, he introduced a bill this year to increase the minimum wage, which stemmed from a sermon he delivered for a class based on Proverbs 21:13. That passage talks about hearing ‘the cry of the poor.’ Before his seminary studies, McEachin said he wouldn’t have introduced such a bill. ‘I feel like I have a standard by which to judge legislation that I didn’t have before,’ McEachin said.”

Lucky for him he’s not a Republican.

When Republicans speak in such explicitly theological terms, they frequently are accused of intolerance, of wanting to “impose their values” on others, of belonging to “the Taliban wing of the GOP,” and so on. Groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State stand poised to pounce on any perceived transgression of the wall between faith and public policy.

Even when Republicans have other virtues, the dangers presumably presented by their religiosity remain foremost in everyone’s mind. Speaking of Del. Robert Marshall — a Republican and a man of religious conviction — three years ago, Arlington Del. Robert Brink said Marshall was “very, very bright and very dedicated. He has a sense of humor, which is something that all ideologues don’t always have.” An abortion-rights activist concurred, saying Marshall was “incredibly bright. Too bad it’s directed toward such a wacko cause.”

“He’s just a very, very sincere person who genuinely wants to integrate his faith with every aspect of his practice and his service.” So says Dean John Kinney of Union — about McEachin. The words apply equally to Marshall, who would agree with McEachin’s assertion: “There is no place that God is not.”

Question: Is it proper or not for public servants to incorporate their faith into their official duties?

What obtuse reasoning the Times Dispatch uses in attacking Americans United in its editorial on Oct 25, 2006.  First it affirms that Christians sometimes cross the line that separates church and state.  Then it objects when someone stands up for our First Amendment and challenges those violations as Americans United does.  Later the Times Dispatch is enthralled that creationism is not being taught in our biology classes, but then it does not support those battles.  Americans United was in Dover PA, spending time, effort and money.  When someone questions Christian December holiday decoration indulgences, the Times Dispatch feels it like ton of bricks as if there were a law suit pending, but the Reverend Lynn’s watchwords for Loudon County were only a reminder of how sensitive we must be when dealing with the education of our children.  Seems Times Dispatch wants comedians giving advice on teen sexuality rather than trained medical professionals.  There’s sensitivity.  And finally, the Times Dispatch’s penultimate reality reversal: blame the defender rather than the instigator.  The Times Dispatch posits that Americans United wants a ‘war on Christmas’ rather than the “theocratic right” who continually flout this in the media like the Times Dispatch.  Now that’s extreme.

D in Chesterfield

The result is that just three-in-ten Americans (30%) currently oppose gay marriage and think a constitutional amendment would be a good idea. Even among groups most strongly opposed to gay marriage (white evangelicals, Republicans, conservatives and senior citizens), less than a majority favor an amendment. ..

Catholics, Mainline Protestants Support Civil Unions
While only one-in-three Americans (35%) favor gay marriage, majorities do express support for civil unions. The poll finds that 54% of Americans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into legal agreements giving them many of the same rights as married couples. This figure, too, is largely unchanged compared with one year ago – but it is nine percentage points higher than it was in October 2003.  

entire article at:

http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=150#5

Editor, Times-Dispatch: Here we go again. The religious extremists are attempting to force their medieval theology on the rest of us by opposing embryonic stem-cell research.
Embryonic stem-cell therapy has the potential to eradicate disease but the religious extremists are trying to assign human status to a mass of cells so small that unless one owns a microscope, he doesn’t even know they exist. They are waging war against a sane society over a mass of cells so small that a period at the end of this sentence would hold hundreds of stem cells. To listen to the extremists, stem cells should be given birth certificates and issued Social Security numbers.

Most of us couldn’t care less what someone believes unless it unreasonably affects the lives, health, and happiness of rational people. The religious extremists claim moral superiority but in reality their claim is nothing more than a power struggle. Their victims are real people with real disease with the hope of real cures. It’s time for the voters to put a stop to this lunacy and move society out of the Dark Ages. The only difference between the religious extremists in our great country and the Taliban is the burqa.

 R Genter

      Fredericksburg City Council opens each meeting with a prayer, which is delivered by members of City Council on a rotating basis.  Traditionally, members give nonsectarian prayers.  However, when Hashmel Turner, a pastor, was elected to Council in 2002, he began offering prayers invoking Jesus Christ. A resident who frequently attends council meetings complained to Turner, causing him to stop participating in the prayer ceremony for a while.  When he started again, the resident asked the ACLU to intervene.  Turner responded to our first letter by ceasing to pray at Coiuncil meetings, but started up again sometime later. The ACLU then wrote the Mayor and all  members of City Council, promising to file a lawsuit if Countil did not prevent Turner from delivering sectarian prayers.  City Council then adopted a policy of requiring prayers to be nonsectarian.  Turner, represented by the Rutherford Institute, filed suit against City Council, claiming that the policy violates his rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, and equal protection.  

      The Supreme Court held in Marsh v. Chambers (1983) that it is permissible for legislative bodies to open their meetings with a prayer, but in subsequent decisions made it clear that such prayers must be nonsectarian.  In Wynne v. Town of Great Falls ( 2004), the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals relied on Marsh v. Chambers when it enjoined a South Carolina Town Council from opening their meetings with a sectarian prayer.

The Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members after Rev. Gregory Boyd urged in June an end to sexual moralizing and military glorification and said America should not be proclaimed a “Christian nation.”

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”
entire article at:

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/disowning-conservative-politics-is/20060729195809990004?ncid=NWS00010000000001

…     But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured–perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again–not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me–but what kind of America I believe in.

     I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute–where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote–where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference–and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

     I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish–where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source–where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials–and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

     For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew–or a Quaker–or a Unitarian–or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you–until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

     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–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 may 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.”

     And in fact this is the kind of America for which our forefathers died–when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches–when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom–and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey–but no one knows whether they were Catholic or not. For there was no religious test at the Alamo.

     I ask you tonight to follow in that tradition–to judge me on the basis of my record of 14 years in Congress–on my declared stands against an Ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools (which I have attended myself)–instead of judging me on the basis of these pamphlets and publications we all have seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the statements of Catholic church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries, and always omitting, of course, the statement of the American Bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed church-state separation, and which more nearly reflects the views of almost every American Catholic.

     I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts–why should you? But let me say, with respect to other countries, that I am wholly opposed to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of any other religion. And I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which deny their Presidency to Protestants and those which deny it to Catholics. And rather than cite the misdeeds of those who differ, I would cite the record of the Catholic Church in such nations as Ireland and France–and the independence of such statesmen as Adenauer and De Gaulle.

     But let me stress again that these are my views–for contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters–and the church does not speak for me.

     Whatever issue may come before me as President–on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject–I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

     But if the time should ever come–and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible–when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

     But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith–nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.

     If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.

     But if, on the other hand, I should win the election, then I shall devote every effort of mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the Presidency–practically identical, I might add, to the oath I have taken for 14 years in the Congress. For without reservation, I can “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution . . . so help me God.