RELIGION IS LIKE A PENIS; FORCING IT UPON OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN IS FROWNED UPON

There is one reason and one reason only that I am writing this particular post, and that reason once dabbled in witchcraft.  Not knowing who I’m talking about at this point is sort of on par with not knowing whether the Earth is larger than the Sun, but then again about 8% of the 640,000 OK Cupid users polled on that very question got it wrong, so maybe ignorance is excusable.  I’m talking about this buck-toothed, beady-eyed, brain-crushingly annoying, cripplingly ignorant excuse for a functional adult, Christine O’Donnell.

Christine is running for Senate in Delaware, and there are a myriad of reasons why she should never be allowed to be in charge of anything, including probably her wardrobe (not because she dresses poorly, but because pants are hard and she could hurt herself), but here are a quick few bullet points.

• She has a bachelor’s in English literature from Farleigh Dickinson University, which she claimed to have gotten in 1993.  In reality, she finished classes last summer and got her diploma seven weeks ago.  This means that Christine got her undergraduate degree more recently than I last bought toilet paper.
• In 2005, she claimed to be working towards a master’s at Princeton, then later admitted she’d never taken a single graduate course there.
• She claimed to have studied at Oxford, when it turns out that she took one class in post-modernism at an unaffiliated institution that happened to be renting land from Oxford.  Sort of like how if you pass out in a church parking lot, you’re Jesus.
• She had a LinkedIn profile that said she studied constitutional government at Claremont graduate school, but Claremont has no record of her and she has since claimed that she wasn’t responsible for the LinkedIn profile at all.  Oh, and Claremont doesn’t offer a degree in constitutional government.

If that wasn’t enough, she honestly thinks that evolution is a myth (it’s not), that Darwin recanted on his deathbed (he absolutely didn’t), and that, and I swear this is a real quote, “American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains” (I refuse to even address that).

But by far the biggest thing she’s catastrophically wrong about is the Constitution.  Now, the Constitution is not a long document.  Roughly 18 pages.  And one of the most important parts of the Constitution is the First Amendment.  Here is a video demonstrating Christine O’Donnell’s understanding of that amendment (remember, she claimed to have studied this document at a graduate level).

Now, some of you might say, “Hey that’s not fair!  In her defense, the words “separation of Church and State” aren’t actually in the First Amendment!  Also, I like the flavor of paste.”  That’s a valid point (about the Constitution).  Here’s the timeline of that phrase.

1791: The First Amendment of the Constitution is ratified and signed into law, along with a lot of the rest of the Constitution.  It reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . ”

1797: The Treaty of Tripoli is signed, stating that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen.”

1802: Thomas Jefferson writes a letter to a group of Baptists in Danbury, CT, saying “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’, thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

1878: In the Supreme Court case Reynolds vs. United States, the court ruled that Thomas Jefferson’s interpretation in the above letter was a valid definition of the First Amendment, and that one’s religious duty (say, to teach their child the literal truth of Genesis) comes second to the law (say, that you can’t teach religious doctrine in a public school).

1947: In the Supreme Court case Everson vs. Board of Education, the court ruled that “neither [state nor federal government] can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.”  Translation: you can’t teach the goddamn Bible in a school paid for by the government.  In a private school, or church, or at home, or in the car between any of those places, or whatever, you can teach religion.  When the kid comes home and asks how babies are made, you can say that Jesus magics them out of your vagina to be friends with them.  You can tell them whatever you want on your own time, but you can’t do it in school.

That’s all there is to it.  Glad that’s cleared up.