The First Amendment

Mainstream Baptist has been on several big rants in the last week. (Well in truth some of them have been other people's rants that he quoted in their entirety.) Most of his arguments are pretty flawed, but today's really caught my eye:

If religious conservatives succeed in repealing the First Amendment, sooner or later, they will find that their faith becomes discredited by association with scores of the failed policies of their political bedfellows that had nothing to do with their religion.

Repeal the First Amendment? Why in God's name would we ever want to do that? For those don't have it memorized, the relevant part of the First Amendment to the US Constitution reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

The right has never argued for the establishment a state church. We would never argue for it. Creating a state church is creating a monster and we know it just as the founding fathers did.

What the political right argues for is not state run religion. What we argue for is a broader definition of "free exercise" in order to practice our religion in all aspects of our lives. That is something completely different. To state otherwise is just attacking a straw man.

Judging from his commentaries on the growth of American "theocracy," attacking strawmen is about all Dr. Prescott is capable of doing.