Christine O'Donnell, Republican candidate for the office of senator in Delaware, asked in a debate with her opponent Chris Coons yesterday: "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?"
Audience-members justly responded with a collective "WTF?" and even some laughter; her opponent, Coons, was also right in pointing to the 1st Amendment, which states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
This would pretty clearly answer the question, but it seems that O'Donnell was still having trouble: "That's in the First Amendment?" She had to actually interrupt Coons several times, during a moderated debate, in order to have him repeat his answer to her.
Coons himself is not a saint, as he later forgot that free speech is also protected by the First Amendment, something O'Donnell gleefully caught him on. In fact, the Republicans seem to be running with Coons' slip-up, trying to reverse this whole thing in O'Donnell's favor.
Michelle Malkin, for instance: "It's obvious that Coons is not only unfamiliar with the rest of the First Amendment, but also that he is wholly unfamiliar with where the phrase 'separation of church and state' originated." Notice the sleight of hand here? Malkin has moved from talking of principles to talking of semantics. "Separation of Church and State" was certainly never there, word-for-word, in the Constitution; rather, it is a rational interpretation of the 1st Amendment. What else could "make no law respecting an establishment of religion" mean? Conservatives like Michelle Malkin and Christine O'Donnell will readily defend an interpretation of the 1st Amendment which protects bloggers from government censorship, even though blogging, the Internet, or even writing (note: freedom of speech) are never mentioned explicitly in the text of that amendment; yet they can't understand the extension of the Establishment Clause which secularizes the American government. Anyone noticing a double standard here? Whatever benefits conservatives politically is apparently the "truth" now.
Similarly, conservatives are raising hell about the fact that Obama has repeatedly left out the phrase "endowed by their Creator" when quoting from the Declaration of Independence. (Ironically, they didn't seem to care so much when Rush Limbaugh mixed up the Constitution and the Declaration entirely at last year's CPAC, but we'll just let that slide, shall we?) A Mr. Doug Powers on Michelle Malkin's blog sneered: "Can Obama's handlers at least put 'enabled by our teleprompter' where 'endowed by our creator' should be? It would be a small step in the right direction and sound a lot better than the 'endowed by government' conclusion that casual observers [read: ignorant rubes like Doug Powers] might draw from the continual 'creator' omissions."
It's true that Obama's made a huge gaffe here by forgetting a crucial part of the Declaration - but conservatives are screwing up even worse by showing an incredible lack of understanding of the very idea of rights which the Founding Fathers had in mind (Thomas Jefferson specifically) when they were designing the system of the American government. Is there really a dichotomy between God-given rights and government-given rights? Is humanity given rights by a divine act or a state act - nothing in between? That's what conservatives are suggesting: either we include "Creator" or we leave the door open for abject communism. But where did Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration, think rights came from? Certainly not from God, but from nature. John Locke, whose ideas were heavily influential on Jefferson (he's where the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" comes from, though he originally used "property" instead of "happiness"), believed in God, but also said that it is man's nature qua man which determines his rights.
He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he eat? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right. (Second Treatise on Civil Government)This has nothing to do with God, though Locke was a fervent advocate of Christianity. Rather, this is a description of the natural process of the acquisition of property. One doesn't need to think that a divine power granted us rights in order to defend human rights; in fact, Occam's Razor demands that we toss out the very idea of God-given rights, because God is entirely superfluous to the process which Locke describes above. Man obtains that which nature has provided, mixes his labor with it, and thereby makes it his - all of this occurs without the intervention of the supernatural.
When will Republicans learn that the only way to defend individual rights is by following Locke's and Jefferson's examples? It seems that the one Founding Father conservatives idolize the most is the one they simultaneously ignore the most. After all, it was Jefferson who asserted: "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God: because, if there be one, he must approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."
