It’s official: Mitt Romney is a fucking douche

I am all kinds of pissed-off about Das Speech. I was expecting Romney to say that he wouldn’t take orders from Salt Lake (and he did), but he also went out of his way to malign people of reason.

I’ll just comment on the greasiest morsels.

America faces a new generation of challenges. Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us. An emerging China endeavors to surpass our economic leadership. And we’re troubled at home by government overspending, overuse of foreign oil, and the breakdown of the family.

Fear buttons activated. The audience is now primed to reject rational thought and swallow authoritarian dogma.

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

Obstreperousness requires pomegranates just as pomegranates require obstreperousness.

Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

Tell that to people in secular countries. Japan. Norway. Most of Europe. You can use your freedom to commune with any beings your imagination can contrive, but don’t go saying religion is some kind of prerequisite.

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It’s as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

Us them, us them. I know Republicans like to hold up this imaginary scarecrow, but it’s so dishonest. If secularism were a religion, I’d be paying tithes. And it’d be a lot better organised.

Do you ever wonder how it is that Mitt knows the ‘original meaning’ of the Separation Clause so much better than the rest of us? Was it a result of personal revelation? Was Romney doing Jefferson’s proxy temple work, and have a visitation? It’s as if he was intent on establishing a new religion in America – the cult of revisionist channeling.

Yes, I do think religion is a private affair. I don’t think all this public god-posturing is a good use of airtime (and no small amount of money as well). I’d love to see less of it in public life. If, just for once, a candidate for office were to able to express an honest doubt about theism, I would fall over. I might also think that maybe rational thought in the public sphere were possible. But that will never happen in today’s America because religious folk have a stranglehold on the discourse. It’s not the secularists.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation “under God” and in God, we do indeed trust.

I think this just shows how insidious religious faith can be. All that God stuff is a relic of the Eisenhower years, and now it’s entrenched.

Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: Does he share these American values – the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another and a steadfast commitment to liberty?

Which Romney has already explained is predicated on religious faith.

Listen: we’ve tried having a person of faith as president. He had so much faith that he could believe anything he wanted was true, without any evidence at all. It was a disaster. Why don’t we try a person of doubt? See how that works for a while.

If you’re a secularist, or if you’re not particularly religious, or even if you’re just suspicious of religious involvement in government, you now know exactly where you stand in Mitt Romney’s America: on the other side of the Wall of Separation.