In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton got 75% of the secularist vote, while the current President's father received support from traditionalists (church-goers) by 2 to 1. That pattern held in the 2000 election. "In terms of their size and party loyalty," Messrs. Bolce and De Maio argue, "secularists today are as important to the Democratic party as another key constituency, organized labor."Journalists evidently covered the general's speech and published his remark for the purpose of persecuting him for his religious belief. The other Democrats, the ones running for POTUS, have picked up that opportunity to criticize a Christian. That plays to the Democratic base, and may be necessary to win the nomination, but the sentiment is also inherently unconstitutional for a POTUS to act on-- no less so than requiring a general to be a Christian would be. Can the Colonels also be required to not be Christians? The Lieutenants? The Sergents? The Privates? And would it matter that the Christian soldier happened to be black?
Where, precisely, do these nonsense-talkers think to find a reliable American military, if atheistic Democrats (who don't have much tendency to become officers, as Gore implicitly acknowledged by trying to suppress the military absentee vote in Florida) are to constitute the entire pool of qualified officers?
The unspoken conceit that Islamacism is a monster which will eat atheists (or, in Lieberman's case, Jews!) last is laughable. What must happen instead is that the American military model First Amendment freedom of religion for Iraq, making no effort to persecute moslems but exerting influence for religious freedom for Iraq's minorities, not excluding its Christians. Such a polity established in Iraq would represent a defeat for Islamicism and for the atheistic Democratic Party.
Democrats love "The First Amendment" as they pretend it to be (with a "wall of seperation" to suppress religion), and actually loathe the First Amendment in its concrete form. They want to establish atheism or at least agnosticism as the religion of the state, they want to establish journalism as infallible when speaking ex cathedra. In short they think contrary opinions to theirs are to be suppressed as "racist" or some such.
Kerry, Lieberman urge ouster of Army officer
Boston Globe ^ | 10/18/2003 | Raja Mishra