Left Side of the Aisle #104 - Part 5

Clown Award: One-third of Americans want state religion

Time for one of our regular features, the Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity.

I had a plethora of good candidates this week. There was, for one, Rep. Joe “Smokey Joe” Barton of Texas, who got the nickname because he is pretty much owned by the petrochemical industry. He says that climate change has nothing to do with people because the Biblical flood was, he said, "an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

Something else that's clearly not overdeveloped is Smokey Joe's grasp of logic.

Then there is Ken Cuccinelli, the attorney general of the state of Virginia. Last month a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s ban on sodomy is unconstitutional in light of the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas.

Cuccinelli has filed a petition with the court, asking for the full 15-judge court to review the decision - that is, he wants them to overturn the decision of the panel and allow Virginia to continue to prosecute people for what its laws call "crimes against nature." Meaning types of sex he finds icky.

But this is our winner: Our winner of the big red nose this week is one-third of the American adult population.
According to a new national HuffingtonPost/YouGov poll, 34 percent of American adults would favor establishing Christianity as the official state religion in their own state. Thirty-two percent said that they would favor a constitutional amendment making Christianity the official religion of the United States as a whole.

Now, I will say that in the first case, a plurality of 47% was against the idea and in the second, a majority of 52% rejected it - but that doesn't change the fact that a third of American adults are so ignorant of our own history as to be prepared to jettison that history along with 200 years of progress toward inclusion, religious freedom, and tolerance and reprise the mistakes of the past in order to define "freedom of religion" to mean your freedom to believe the same things they do.

Just as disturbing, 11% of the people thought the US Constitution allows states to establish their own official religions and another 31% weren't sure. Whether that is just plain old ignorance or the results of the reactionaries pressing their inane "Tenther" arguments - referring to the idea of "state sovereignty" under the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights - I don't know.

But in either event, the sheer level of ignorance is frightening. Clownish, but frightening.

Sources:
http://crooksandliars.com/juanita-jean/smokey-joe-barton-smokin-something
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/03/ken_cuccinelli_challenges_virginias_sodomy_ruling/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/06/christianity-state-religion_n_3022255.html