Jonathan's blog

From an article of the same title by Steven Waldman on beliefnet:

When U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said separation of church and state is "a lie," many critics figured this was a characteristic Harris gaffe--another sign she was out of the mainstream. Actually, she was reflecting what has become a common view in religious conservative circles--that the idea of separation of church and state was concocted by 20th-century courts, not the Founding Fathers... Conservative activists point out that the words "separation of church and state" appear nowhere in the Constitution--and they're right about that. The phrase came from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of Connecticut Baptists in which he praised the First Amendment's "wall between church and state." When the Supreme Court quoted that letter in a key church-state ruling in 1947, the "wall" became the dominant metaphor. While political activists have lately pushed the more combative rhetoric, serious conservative scholars have long argued that the Founders were mostly attempting to block the creation of official state religions when, in the First Amendment, they wrote that Congress could not make laws "respecting an establishment of religion." Therefore, wrote former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, "there is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the 'wall of separation.'" It's also true that when the First Amendment was approved, lawmakers assumed it would only apply to the federal government, allowing the states wide latitude in mixing church and state. (It was the 14th Amendment, passed after the civil war, that applied freedom of religion to the states)... But there's one important difference between mainstream conservative legal scholars and the Christian political activists. Most conservative scholars argue that the Constitution can accommodate a great deal of state support for religion, as long as the government avoids favoring one faith over another. Many modern Christian activists have argued that the U.S. is "a Christian nation" and that the Founders intended not only religion in general, but Christianity specifically... Christian activists usually make the argument by casting the Founders as orthodox Christians, except when it comes to Jefferson, who was downright hostile to organized Christianity.

From an article of the same title on beliefnet by Daniel Burke of the Religion News Service:

On the way to the church picnic, some Christians may not be sidestepping one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony. A new study surmises that among Christians in the U.S. -- particularly Baptists, Pentecostals and Catholics -- there is a significant relationship between being religious and being obese. The study tracked about 2,800 religious Americans of various denominations for eight years. Baptists, according to the study, were most likely to be obese, followed by Pentecostals, Catholics, Methodists and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Denominations that stress physical health, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Seventh-day Adventists, show low levels of obesity, according to the study. There is also a very low percentage of obese Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists in the U.S., the study found. Because religion is often associated with positive health factors, such as lower blood pressure, stronger immune systems and less depression, the results of the study were somewhat surprising, said Purdue University sociology professor Kenneth E. Ferraro, a leader of the research.

In an interesting article of the same title on slate.com, Fred Kaplan examines

...the spectacle of our leaders wrapping themselves in [9/11's] legacy as if it were some tattered shroud that sanctifies their own catastrophic mistakes and demonizes all their critics.

Most interesting to me was Kaplan's response to Rumsfeld's fourth rhetorical question:

"And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America-not the enemy-is the real source of the world's trouble?" This is another red herring. Few Americans, and virtually no contenders in American politics, hold this view. However, a lot of people in other countries-including countries that are, or should be, our allies-do hold this view. Look at the Pew Research Center's most recent "global attitudes survey," released this past June. In only four of the 15 nations surveyed (Britain, India, Japan, and Nigeria) did a majority of citizens have a favorable view of the United States. In six countries (Spain, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, and Jordan), Iran had a higher rating than did the United States. (In one more, Russia, the two countries' ratings were tied.) Most remarkable, in all but one country (Germany), America's presence in Iraq was seen as a bigger danger to world peace than either Iran or North Korea. These views are widespread-and, by the way, they've grown steadily more prominent in the past few years-not because of "the media" or "blame-America-first" liberals, nor because Iran and North Korea have more skillful propagandists (or, if they do, it's time for Condoleezza Rice to hire a better public-diplomacy staff). No, a country's global image is usually formed not by what its leaders say but rather by what they do. If the war on terror is "a battle for the future of civilization," as Cheney claimed in his speech (or even if it's merely a serious struggle), and if the United States needs allies to wage it, the president and his team would better spend their time luring allies than beating up on journalists and Democrats. If Rumsfeld is serious, he should revisit the questions he asked back in October 2003. Those-not the cleverly phrased debaters' points he muttered this past Monday-really are some "central questions of our time."

Via Boing Boing, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann got all riled up about Rumsfeld's speech and gave a sharp rebuttal. Video and transcript/text here and here.

We spent Sunday evening on the beach in Grand Haven and watched the sun set.

Via Andrew Sullivan's blog, from an op-ed piece of the same title (sub-titled "This Isn't the Way to Ban Same-Sex Marriage") by J. Harvie Wilkinson III in The Washington Post:

The chief casualty in the struggle over same-sex marriage has been the American constitutional tradition. Liberals and conservatives -- judges and legislators -- bear responsibility for this sad state of affairs. Twenty states have constitutional amendments banning gay marriages; many more are in the offing. On the ballot this fall in Virginia and five other states will be proposed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. Passage of the amendments is all but foreordained, but the first principles of American law will be further endangered... The Framers meant our Constitution to establish a structure of government and to provide individuals certain inalienable rights against the state. They certainly did not envision our Constitution as a place to restrict rights or enact public policies, as the Federal Marriage Amendment does. Ordinary legislation -- not constitutional amendments -- should express the community's view that marriage "shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman." To use the Constitution for prescriptions of policy is to shackle future generations that should have the same right as ours to enact policies of their own. To use the Constitution as a forum for even our most favored views strikes a blow of uncommon harshness upon disfavored groups, in this case gay citizens who would never see this country's founding charter as their own... To constitutionalize matters of family law is to break with state traditions. The major changes in family law in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the recognition of married women's property rights and the liberalization of divorce, occurred in most states at the statutory level. Even the infamous bans on interracial marriage were adopted nonconstitutionally by 35 states, and by constitutional amendment in only six... Marriage between male and female is more than a matter of biological complementarity -- the union of the two has been thought through the ages to be more mystical and profound than the separate identities of each alone. Without strong family structures, there will be no stable and healthy social order, and alternative marriage structures might weaken the sanction of law and custom necessary for human families to flourish and children to grow. These are no small risks, and present trends are not often more sound than the cumulative wisdom of the centuries. Is it too much to ask that judges and legislatures acknowledge the difficulty of this debate by leaving it to normal democratic processes?