Friday, April 22, 2005

Friday Afternoon

A hovering grey cloud of a deadline will probably keep me posting very much here the next few days but I wanted to link to two items, both of which I came across on Talking Points Memo, a fine political weblog maintained by Joshua Micah Marshall.

One is this item where he's quoting Andrew Sullivan and...oh, here. I'll save you all that mouse-clicking effort and quote it myself...

QUOTE FOR THE DAY I: "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 parishioners for whom to vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ... 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." — President John F. Kennedy.

At the time, the speech was regarded as an attempt to refute anti-Catholic prejudice. Today, wouldn't the theocons regard it as an expression of anti-Catholic prejudice? Wouldn't Bill Frist see President Kennedy as an enemy of "people of faith"? Just asking.

Good point. Someplace — I wish I could find it — I once read a fine article by Kurt Vonnegut which said, of various religious-based political movements, something like, "They don't understand that in America, we allow different religions to co-exist not by denying their worth but by agreeing to set them aside in matters of public policy." I even find a certain amount of arrogance in the very term, "People of faith," because it presumes that people who are not of your faith — or even of the way you spin a political matter as an expression of your faith — are people of no faith at all. Anyway, on to the other item...

I feel like everyone who lives in the state of Pennsylvania owes the rest of the country an apology for making Rick Santorum a Senator. And don't write and tell me you didn't vote for him. You should have tried harder to keep this guy from getting into office. This is the man who compared consensual homosexual sex to someone having sex with a dog. This is the man who is taking outright bribes from Wal-Mart to push legislation favorable to a company that already thinks it's above the law. This is the man who tried to gut medical malpractice awards even though his wife recently won a large one. His latest gambit is that he wants to block the U.S. Weather Service from making its weather data available for free on the Internet. This is the weather data that is paid for by our tax money. Santorum has introduced a bill — and apparently, a vague and sloppily worded one, at that — that would stop that because it cuts into the profits of private services like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel. Do I even have to explain what a rotten, unfair-to-us idea this is? Hope he got paid well for this one.

I'm going back to that assignment. I'll check in from time to time over the weekend.

• Posted at 4:23 PM · LINK

Bidding on Pope Futures

Rogers Cadenhead is a clever writer. We've crossed paths a few times — I don't recall if I interviewed him or he interviewed me but it was one of those — so I was surprised to see him on Countdown With Keith Olbermann yesterday on MSNBC. (And by the way, that there's just about the best news-type show on TV these days, as far as I'm concerned.)

With a bit of foresight, Rogers managed to grab up the domain name, www.benedictXVI.com before some porn huckster or online casino could get to it. Very swift. And he doesn't intend to keep it; not unless they don't want it over at The Vatican. On his weblog, he explains what he intends to get out of this, and I'm cheering him on. I'm hoping they go for the World Peace but I'll settle to see him get the hat. Can't believe that some people apparently think he's doing something wrong here.

• Posted at 1:44 AM · LINK