Richard Cohen's excellent column in this morning's Washington Post makes a few excellent points about surging GOP candidate Mike Huckabee's rhetoric on Church-State issues. Cohen points out that Huckabee is pretty clear about his intentions in this record, and reminds us how bad the Bush administration has been when it comes to putting science second.
From Cohen's piece:
A fair reading of the Huckabee literature -- his Web site, interviews, etc. -- shows a similar religious inclination, and while on "The Charlie Rose Show" or something similar he can have moments of secular lucidity, his Web site forthrightly declares that he does not distinguish between his faith and his politics. "I don't separate my faith from my personal and professional lives," he says.
But a president should do exactly that. When Huckabee says he favors the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, he's taking a distinctly religious position. Intelligent design has no basis in science. And when any issue, any question, becomes a matter of faith, it means it cannot be argued. That's not what we do in a democracy. We argue about everything. (This column is my modest contribution.)
And, here's what Cohen writes about the Bush Administration:
Back before Bush, it was considered narrow-minded and, worst of all, elitist, to judge a person by the intensity of his religious convictions. Belief was not supposed to matter, and so it was impermissible to conclude anything about a person even if he thought Darwin was wrong or, more recently, that homosexuals chose their sexual orientation, presumably just to irritate the Christian right. Religion was irrelevant. Everyone said so -- and I agreed.
Bush changed that. He infused government with religion, everything from ineffective programs that promote sexual abstinence to an adamant refusal to authorize federal spending for most embryonic stem-cell research. The administration even erected barriers to the marketing of the Plan B morning-after pill. All these measures ran up against obstacles that were essentially religious, not strictly scientific, in nature.
Even the war in Iraq had an undeniably religious cast to it. It's not just that Bush told Bob Woodward that it was not his own father -- George H.W. Bush -- to whom he looked for strength, but "a higher father," it's also that the president consistently puts himself on the side of God in matters distinctly secular, such as his crusade for democracy. "I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom," the president has said. Maybe so, maybe not, but that's not a sound basis for a foreign policy.
Comments