This is the first in a series of blog posts detailing the religious views of the “American” “Tea ‘Party’.” (excessive quotation required)
A man by the name of Glen Urquhart has won the Republican primary for a Delaware seat in the House of Representatives, currently held by Republican Mike Castle, who was recently defeated in his bid for a Senate seat by another notorious Tea Partier, Christine O’Donnell.
Glen Urquhart, at a campaign event in April 2010, asked aloud:
Do you know, where does this phrase ’separation of church and state’ come from? It was not in Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists. … The exact phrase ’separation of Church and State’ came out of Adolph Hitler’s mouth, that’s where it comes from. So the next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State ask them why they’re Nazis.
The blog Below the Beltway has a more detailed write-up on the historical accuracy of this statement, but needless to say, Urquhart is about as wrong as you’d expect:
(Jefferson, writing to a committee of the Danbury Baptists in 1802) … Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God … I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
Two months later, Urquhart clarified his statement after a video surfaced, apparently filmed by a man working for a contending GOP candidate:
It was an April mistake. In that segment, it was not as skillfully worded as I would like to have been … Let’s all be careful about what phrases we use without thinking them through. The Nazis used the same separation-of-church-and-state rhetoric for a very, very bad purpose. I didn’t mean to suggest — and I am not suggesting — that people who are liberals are Nazis … Faith was at the center of the creation of the United States … We have it on our money, ‘In God We Trust.’ We have moved towards an ‘In Government We Trust’ statement of faith. … I think the pendulum has swung dramatically against the Christian faith. It’s almost become a whipping boy in our society. There is obviously every need for religious tolerance — and that applies to Christians, Jews and Moslems.
It should be noted Urquhart’s confused position has this writer confused as well.
