Rick Santorum today said he regrets telling me on “This Week” that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion made him want to “throw up.”
“I wish that I had that particular line back,” Santorum, who is also Catholic, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show today.
On Sunday Santorum criticized Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association saying he did not agree with Kennedy when he said “the separation of church and state is absolute.”
“To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” Santorum asked on “This Week.”
Today Ingraham, a conservative radio host, told the former Pennsylvania Senator that she believes he is a tolerant person but “sometimes Senator, when you’re out there and it’s like ‘I’m going to throw up when I heard JFKs line on that.’ I mean, as a Catholic, he’s a revered president of the United States, assassinated, I probably wouldn’t have gone down that road with JFK and I was going to throw up. We generally don’t want to hear presidential candidates talking about throwing up at all in any context.”
Santorum said he “would agree with that.”
{George Stephanopoulos/Matzav.com Newscenter}
So why did he say it in the first place? First you engage the brain, then you step on the speech pedal.
Wish he didn’t apologize.
What do you get when you cross Rick Santorum and a Gefilte Fish Dish?
(Fools Gold)
A key aspect of American freedom is Freedom of Religion, which means the following. For many centuries, each European nation had a particular church that was the official religion of that nation. (In many countries, the government was actually tightly controlled by that church’s leaders.) Every citizen had to be a member of that religion; those who were adherents of another religion were treated as outcasts.
Needless to say, these rules posed extremely severe difficulties to the Jewish populace of these countries, which was thus subjected to countless mean discriminations and cruel abuses.
In sharp contrast to this, America was established as a free country, where a person would be free to choose whichever religion he wanted. Soon after the nation was founded, the first President of the United States, George Washington actually visited the famous Jewish congregation, the Turo Synagogue. In his address there, he clearly declared that here in this country, there would be no discrimination or prejudice. There There would be no national church; this was stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Congress shall make no law representing the establishment of religion, nor limiting the free exercise thereof.
This was latter developed into what is really a different principle, called “The Separation of Church and State.” This Church-State Separation axiom was further distorted into a set of extreme prohibitions that strictly forbade any religious action in the public/government realm.
These new “laws” were obviously NOT what was meant by the First Amendment, and even the founding fathers did not follow them! Yes, the founding fathers themselves DID have a good bit of outright religious expression, right in their government!
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Two examples of the founding fathers’ piety in public government:
The “Declaration of Independence,” which declares America’s philosophy, begins with the statement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed BY THEIR CREATOR with certain unalienable Rights . . . ” (emphasis mine).
(By their referring to The Lord as “their Creator,” we further see that the founding fathers believed in Creationism: that man — and the whole world — was CREATED by The Lord.)
A number of years after the Declaration, the nation’s leaders had the tedious task of formulating the details of the government’s constitution. At this Constitutional Convention, prayer recitation became an integral part of the proceedings. See an account of this at http://www.homeofheroes.com/hallofheroes/3rd_floor/god/2_convention.html.
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Here is an example of public/government spirituality in very recent times.
We well remember twelve years ago the 2000 presidential campaign. The Democrat Party candidate for president was the (then) Vice President Albert Gore. As is well known, Mr. Gore is a very strong liberal Democrat. Even though he is a liberal, for the Democrat Party candidate for vice president, Mr. Gore chose someone who in some ways is a bit of a more “conservative” Democrat, Senator Joseph Lieberman.
During the campaign, Mr. Lieberman strongly criticized this distorted rigid Church-State Separation rule. He repeatedly expressed the very sharp line that “Freedom OF religion” has been distorted to become “Freedom FROM religion”! He often quoted P’sukim from Tanach (Biblical verses) and unabashedly declared that there SHOULD BE religion in, yes, public life! For an account of one of these speech engagements, see http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/28/latimes.lieberman/index.html.