Right. Yes. Mitt Romney, if elected our president, "will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause and no one interest." Nor should any candidate "become the spokesman for his faith." Yes, naturally.
If such was the point most take-away from Romney's venture at dispelling fears of his Mormonism, well, yawn. What presidential candidate could differ with such a description of the chief executive's role in a nation of many faiths? We have to hope, I think, that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would speak similarly.
No, the core of Romney's speech -- viewed as some kind of exam on approaches to dealing with the "religious right" -- was further down in the text. At the Bush presidential library, that core won vigorous applause. One might hope his words -- and the reaction -- will stay with us a while.
With gentility but also some intellectual force, Romney lit into the secularists who -- infinitely more than the supposedly fearsome Bible-wallopers of the religious right -- have forced on us the issue of religion in public life.
Said Mitt: "Religion is seen as a private affair, with no place in public life. It is as if they (were) intent on establishing a new religion in America -- the religion of secularism. They are wrong."
Right -- they're wrong. That's -- as the old radio show had it -- The Big Story. They're wrong. Romney does well to say so in this blunt fashion.
Somehow, my worthy, lifelong profession, the mass media -- following the lead of the cultural establishment -- have made up their collective mind that the evangelicals, the religious-righters, the preachers, the shouters, call them what you will, launched in the '60s some cockeyed crusade to put the Holy Bible in the center of our affairs. Putting it there might not be such a bad thing, but assuredly, that's not what the preachers, etc., undertook.
The preachers didn't start this business; the secularists did. Out of the celestial blue came the news from the U.S. Supreme Court, in the '60s, that the public schools enjoyed no right to allow prayer of any kind or the reading of the Bible.
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