The big news is that President Barrack Obama won a 2nd term as President. Three states voted to allow same sex marriage. Florida’s Amendment 8 went down to defeat but the only publicly known atheist serving in the Congress lost his race. For those of us who support church and state separation, the 2012 election turned out to be a mixed bag but better than if Mitt Romney had won.
While checking out my hometown newspaper Monday I found a listing of the voting locations for the Presidential election on Tuesday November 6th. The thing that bothered me is a majority of the voting locations are located in churches. Back when I was a kid the majority were in schools. I can understand why they don’t have them in the schools today but having them in churches is not a good idea either for a government based on secular principles.
Rev. Billy Graham, or rather his ministry, had a full page ad in the New York Times and other news papers around the country electioneering for god. In the ad, Graham asks people to “cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel.” Graham’s call crosses the line against churches electioneering for candidates.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation will be filing a complaint about the “coded” message:
Alliance Defending Freedom, which sponsored Pulpit Freedom Sunday on October 7th, claimed over a 1,000 pastors would be taking part in violating the tax laws prohibiting a tax exempt group, such as churches, from electioneering at the pulpit. If the law breaking pastors had done some basic research they would have seen that having a protest now was a waste of time. The IRS suspended investigations of churches in 2009 due to a federal law suit. Basically Pulpit Freedom Sunday was a failure.
As I posted previously:
A Google alert caught my eye on Sunday. It was to a post on a website called LifeNews.com and it was titled “Liberals Are Trying to Intimidate Your Church This Election”. So of course I had to read about this very important issue. The post basically was the standard conservative scare post. Naturally none of their information was correct. What I did find interesting was links to two voter guides. I didn’t know that a church was so concerned with obviously non-religious issues like energy, Voter ID, and Iran.
Thursday nights Vice Presidential debate between current VP Joe Biden and GOP nominee Rep. Paul Ryan contained topics from domestic issues and foreign affairs. Toward the end of the night debate moderator Martha Raddatz asked, since both men are of the Catholic faith, about abortion. Each man’s answer drew a sharp contrast on the relationship between faith and public policy. I thought Vice President Biden had the correct view.
This is from a transcript hosted by the website Plunderbund but I did view the debate and vouch for the text in this transcript:
