TAG | campaign
I love Sarah…Silverman (not Palin).
I love Matt’s passion. This would be funny if he were trying to be funny, but it’s awesome because he’s truly angry. Me, too.
I think candidates should be disqualified (by the voters, of course) if they believe dinosaurs and humans existed simultaneously or that the entire earth was flooded to the mountain tops or that evolution is “just a theory”. We need intelligent leaders, not credulous nincompoops.
Photo: Brent Danley
Last Sunday we drove to Hampton, New Hampshire to attend a Hillary Clinton rally. We stood outside the local high school cafeteria for an hour or so, then stood two more hours inside before she finally arrived. After a brief speech she spent the remainder of her time answering questions. The room was so packed that they had an overflow area in the gymnasium. At one point an aide handed her a note which began, “Fire department extremely upset…” Doh! Too many people, apparently.
Skye elbowed her way up to the railing and enthusiastically raised her hand until Hillary eventually called on her. Skye asked, “I’m eight and I skipped second grade. It’s still easy. So, how can you make it more challenging?” After some laughter and much applause, Hillary responded.
First of all, her faith is very important to her; she’s always been quite religious in a more traditional way. She was raised in a Methodist home. She taught Sunday school for a while while I was a governor. And she religiously read a lot of books about theology, religion, and the history of faith. It’s very interesting. But, she feels much more strongly than they do that the founders were right. [APPLAUSE]
A lot of our founders might not be able to get elected today because they were deists, you know. Thomas Jefferson even clipped out the Bible and just stripped it down to the essential teachings of Jesus. I don’t know if you ever saw the Jefferson Bible, it’s quite interesting. Those fellows would have a hard time passing that Republican test, I guarantee you. Jefferson, Washington, and all of them, they’d have a hard time getting over the bar. I think it’s interesting, there’s no doubt in my mind, the reason America has the largest percentage of citizens who regularly go to churches and synagogues and mosques and temples is that we keep the government out of their faith. [APPLAUSE]
We allow people to be non-believers and we don’t use taxpayer money trying to pick and choose winners when it comes to faith. I don’t think there’s any question about that.
When the tsunami hit South Asia, before President Bush asked his father and me to go head up this group, Hillary and I went to one of her constituencies in Queens. They had a Buddhist temple and they were gathering up stuff to send to Sri Lanka. They had, it was amazing, all these African American guys from the local African American church showed up with supplies, the local Hispanic community leaders from the local Catholic church came up, and then the local people from the synagogue came up, and they had some Muslims came from a couple miles away and they were all contributing to this and I thought, “You know, this only works because the government does not get into this.†I mean, it was a tribute to the wisdom of the founding fathers and she thinks they were right. [APPLAUSE]
This response, of course, is calculated to appeal to a very broad audience. It is, however, in stark contrast to Mitt Romney’s statement in his “Faith in America” speech that “freedom requires religion” and his implied assertion that the founding fathers intended to create a religious (if not Christian) government.
I also very much like her position on Iraq, health care, taxes, economics, diplomacy, and science. Go Hillary!
