1st Amendment sez WHAAAAAA???

[WhiteBear]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/19/christine-odonnell-church-and-state_n_767910.html?ref=fb&src=sp

With Palin running for -any- position at all, that's encouraging soccer-moms across the country to run for office...O'Donnell's downfall is she doesn't have a handler to feed her the "tough answers" LOL

 

[unk]

The first amendment states,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.


Good for Palin then and good for O'Donnell for not having/needing a 'handler'.

 

[Laura]

From the article:

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious doctrine doesn't belong in our public schools."

"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"

Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

"You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp," Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O'Donnell's grasp of the Constitution. ...

Not only! It's jaw dropping!

And then:

O'Donnell, a tea party favorite who stunned the state by winning the GOP primary last month in her third Senate bid in five years, called Coons a liberal "addicted to a culture of waste, fraud and abuse."

She doesn't even get it that it is people like her - pathological - whose ignorance of real life is the chief cause of waste, fraud and abuse in government.

 

[Nienna]

Jaw dropping is right! It is just mind blowing that, first Palin, now anyone who has no clue, can run for office of anything in the U.S. This just goes to show that the psychopaths in power really do want to fill up the spots below them with people dumber than they are.

It's really pathetic.

 

[Keit]

Oh, O'Donnell just got confused. See, in her mind she is probably living in Israel! Also, for someone with such a rabid faith in Constitution she isn't versed in her "scriptures" well enough. But that's also similar to the Jewish religious approach of interpretating text as they see fit. ;)

_http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/17/how-tea-partiers-get-the-constitution-wrong.html

The Founders’ masterpiece, O’Donnell said, isn’t just a legal document; it’s a “covenant” based on “divine principles.” For decades, she continued, the agents of “anti-Americanism” who dominate “the D.C. cocktail crowd” have disrespected the hallowed document. But now, finally, in the “darker days” of the Obama administration, “the Constitution is making a comeback.” Like the “chosen people of Israel,” who “cycle[d] through periods of blessing and suffering,” the Tea Party has rediscovered America’s version of “the Hebrew Scriptures” and led the country into “a season of constitutional repentance.” Going forward, O’Donnell declared, Republicans must champion the “American values” enshrined in our sacred text. “There are more of us than there are of them,” she concluded.

This quote is also interesting:

Since winning the Republican senate primary in Delaware last month, Christine O’Donnell has not had trouble getting noticed. When the Tea Party icon admitted to “dabbl[ing] into witchcraft” as a youngster, the press went wild. When she revealed that she was “not a witch” after all, the response was rabid. O’Donnell has fudged her academic credentials, defaulted on her mortgage, sued a former employer, and campaigned against masturbation, and her efforts have been rewarded with round-the-clock coverage. Yet few observers seem to have given her views on the United States Constitution the same level of consideration. Which is too bad, because O’Donnell’s Tea Party take on our founding text is as unusual as her stance on autoeroticism. Except that it could actually have consequences.

 

[Buddy]

[quote author=Andrew Romano]
By now, O’Donnell’s rhetoric should sound familiar. In part that’s because her fellow Tea Party patriots—Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the guy at the rally in the tricorn hat—also refer to the Constitution as if it were a holy instruction manual that was lost, but now, thanks to them, is found.

And yet the reverberations go further back than Beck.

The last time America elected a new Democratic president, in 1992, the Republican Party’s then-dominant insurgent group used identical language to describe the altogether different document that defined their cause and divided them from the heretics in charge: the Bible. The echoes of the religious right in O’Donnell’s speech—the Christian framework, the resurrection narrative, the “us vs. them” motif, the fixation on “values”—aren’t coincidental.

From a legal perspective, there’s a case to be made that O’Donnell’s argument is inaccurate. The Constitution is a relentlessly secular document that never once mentions God or Jesus. And nothing in recent jurisprudence suggests that the past few decades of governing have been any less constitutional than the decades that preceded them.

But the Tea Party’s language isn’t legal, and neither is its logic. It’s moral: right vs. wrong.

What O’Donnell & Co. are really talking about is culture war.
[/quote]
_http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/17/how-tea-partiers-get-the-constitution-wrong.html

I'm interested in the man behind the curtain, here. Specifically, I'm wondering who the speech writers are. The ones who are responsible for ensuring relative consistency among the 'culture warriors' who don't even know the contents of the “covenant” they are 'protecting'.

The 'dunce' wouldn't even know there is reason to hide his ignorance, so where does the consistency in rhetoric come from? Hmmm.