Separation of ...

When the politicians went back to their constituents to try to explain the new health care plan they were forging, there was pandemonium. Voters were angry. The politician response was that the complaints were choreographed. It was a prearranged complaint. Republicans were playing politics.

It's not the first time the complaint has been floated. The President assured us that the reason Republicans in Congress were against some of his plans was ... politics. They weren't, apparently, opposed in principle. It was politics.

It makes me wonder. The U.S. Supreme Court has used the phrase "the separation of church and state" more than 25 times since 1878. The idea is predicated on the First Amendment. The First Amendment, however, doesn't actually include the phrase. Instead, the amendment addresses two things: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The amendment prohibits establishing a state religion or preventing the free exercise of one's beliefs. Nothing in the prohibitions of the First Amendment require that there must be a separation of church and state. But by 1947 it was viewed as the law of the land. And reason began to be excluded from politics. When, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that, on the basis of privacy, a woman had the right to kill her unborn baby, the removal of reason from politics was complete.

Next it was religion. Bolstered by the separation of church and state, politicians and more set out to remove religion from politics. People bought the idea in principle, but actually separating religion from politics was a real problem. For instance, trying to figure out the basis for law without including religion is a near impossibility. Remove a Lawgiver, and "law" becomes a simple matter of opinion. Besides, the majority of folks in America are religious. Most people understand that religion isn't just a private matter. It's a part of one's life. In 2000, a survey suggested that people had become ambivalent about religion in politics. We appear to be equally divided on whether or not there should be a separation of church and state. Still, after decades of work, it has become nearly an axiom that religion should be done in private, not in public. And we've nearly achieved the removal of religion from politics.

So what's next? Well, having bypassed reason and jettisoned religion, it appears that the next requirement is that politics be removed from politics. Politicians don't want a grassroots movement to counter their opinions. They don't want an organized movement to counter their opinions. Politics has no place in politics. Wait ...