Things That Just Piss Me Off

This post by Lou Dobbs makes some really good points related to my recent blog post on The Religious Right and Politics so I wanted to share it here.

Dobbs: Keep religion out of politics
By Lou Dobbs, CNN

Editor’s note: Lou Dobbs’ commentary appears every Wednesday on CNN.com

The political strategists, campaign managers, and the partisan savants will be working overtime to excite their conservative, liberal, Republican and Democratic bases, trying to get at least 50 percent of us who’ve registered to vote to actually go to the polls.

Which is one of the biggest problems we have. When less people vote, special interest groups find it easier to get their way. They motivate their base to go to the polls while many independent thinkers don’t bother.

As in election years past, they’re going to have a lot of help, and not just from PACs, labor unions and 527 groups like MoveOn and Progress for America. Oh no, we’re going to be treated to something akin to, and as close as we should expect to get to, divine intervention. Evangelical Christians, Jews, Catholics, Muslims and Mormons are already getting rowdy, not only on their respective pulpits, but in the mail, on the air and certainly on the campaign trails.

Now I know you’re thinking that this is America, what is religion doing in politics and what is politics doing in religion. As it turns out, just about everything. And the politically correct orthodoxy would prefer you and I not take notice.

The First Amendment of our Constitution declares that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But the devil’s in the details, if you will, and the often demonized Internal Revenue Service has taken up the issue where other federal agencies and branches of government have feared to tread: This summer the IRS sent out a warning letter to more than 15,000 churches and tax-exempt nonprofit organizations throughout the nation. The letter is meant to serve notice that any sort of politicking could endanger their tax-exempt status.

This is what I was posting about in my blog post. Nonprofit organizations that are not listed as political organizations are not allowed to endorse candidates, yet you hear them doing it all the time and no one has been enforcing this against nonprofit religion-based organizations.

The IRS discovered a disturbing amount of intervention by religious groups in national politics in 2004. It determined nearly five dozen churches and charities violated laws against political activities, and there are now 40 active investigations into the politicking of various churches.

The mixture of religion and politics is on public display throughout the country. The Mormon Church rolled out the red carpet for Mexican President Vicente Fox, embraces illegal immigrants in the state of Utah and helped pro-amnesty incumbent Congressman Chris Cannon with a get out the vote campaign.

Apparently nobody in the federal government is too concerned that the Catholic Church has repeatedly lobbied on behalf of millions of illegal aliens and their supporters for wholesale amnesty and open borders. Until the Supreme Court ordered him to, the head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, didn’t think he should cooperate with the law when it came to divulging information on priests accused of pedophilia, and he believes it is entirely correct to encourage his parishioners to civil disobedience in the case of legislation that secures our borders and punishes those who cross them illegally. The Cardinal disavows the will of the people in opposition to current law. Ironically he’s now spearheading a drive to register a million new voters by 2008. Where he’ll find them, only heaven knows.

The role of religion in politics and the role of politics in religion in this country has never deserved more attention and merited more intense examination than now. Religion is dominant in the lives of most Americans: The latest Gallup Poll reveals that nearly two-thirds of us are members of a church or synagogue and about one-third of us attend church or synagogue at least once a week.

Surveys show as many as 250 million Americans are Christian and 70 million of us describe ourselves as evangelicals.

That is a lot of votes and in my opinion as long as christians are voting their own opinions on who is best to serve our country in political office, then there is no reason they should not have this influence. It’s a democracy. Majority rules. Like it or not, that is our system.

However, when any type of organizations conspire to influence the voters, it skews the results. When religion is used to push people into choosing the candidate their church or nonprofit religious organization tells them which candidate is the moral choice, it exerts even more influence. Many of these church leaders use guilt to drive people to vote the way they want them to.

Now that it is legal for religious organizations to get federal funding, there is a conflict of interest for these nonprofits. You have to ask if they are choosing a candidate based on religious and/or morals or they are choosing the candidate that promises to keep federal funding available to them.

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