Well I hear someone's had an extra marital affair. I know it wasn't me. It wasn't my wife, was it? Oh thank god! That's such a relief because for a second there I thought that it may have something to do with me or my family or perhaps that it migh...

Before you go after Romney, consider targeting first John Adams....

Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

...You are either with Him or against him...

When you see the very act of not believing in your God as aggression against your God and by extension you. You define the atheist as an aggressor and then use this aggression as excuse for your 'counter' aggression. That's quite a nice little cocoon of circular logic you have built for yourself.
Just curious.
Does "with Him or against Him" leave the Hindus and animists in or out? Are you with them or against them?
Is it OK to be for Her or It?
What about the satanists and wiccans? Does it have to be the right Him/Them or will any Him/Them do?

Now he says he'd rather set up society with Osama bin Laden rather than
Ted Williams???

Wow, the authenticity just drips off of him, doesn't it? Not. I thought he was supposed to be like Reagan but he's starting to seem more like Kerry. Given that Romney is so into ">
quotas for deciding who should be in government, perhaps he needs to take a look at the fact that there are a whole lot more non-religious people in America (around 15%, the third largest group after Catholics and Baptists) than there are Mormons. That he responds to anti-Mormonism by picking on others rather than denouncing or at least distancing himself from bigotry is pathetic.

Unreligious people in the next decade or two will probably be like gay in the 2000s. The paranoia and bigotry ebb away and suddenly you find out that there are a lot more of them including people you know than you ever realized before.

Disingenuous hackery at its finest.

There are no such things as non believers. It is just a matter of whether or not someone chooses to worship God or be God. "You are either with Him or against him." There is no middle ground. We have seen far too many "atheists" who profess to not believe in a god, spend their entire lives fighting God - hence their claim that God doesn't exist.

That's some high density bull%#%^ you got there, Don. You might want to look into getting some fiber in your diet to help keep it from getting impacted like that.

Their gods may be the almighty state, or science, or sex, or wealth, or power, or knowledge, but it usually comes down to the fact that the godless chose self to have complete faith in.

This is why they wrote the Constitution they way they did. It is also why the religious right is completely wrong and so dangerous.

I think it just drives home the point that the notion of religious liberty for all, as opposed to just for one's own group, arose from pragmatic democratic compromise, not from any inherint religious principle.

Maybe we could just consider the notion of religious liberty to be the 18th century version of multi-culturalism.

But who, in the context of a presidential campaign, would make an argument like that? :)

we would probably had an established church in this country, as we did in some of the early colonies.

Connecticut had an established church until 1818, Massachusetts until 1833. There were locally established churches that persisted much, much longer.

Romney seems to be in the crosshairs of the religious bigots, and his efforts seem to be a plea for them to accept him in their fold, so that together they can go to war against the real enemy, the non-believers.

As others have noted, the problem is most certainly not that he failed to mention non-beleivers, it is that he explicitly outlined his vision for an American community of ideas, with faith as its defining feature.

Most of the progress that has ever been achieved in terms of the advancement of liberty has come about in opposition to religion, not because of it.

In fact, were it not for the fact that America was settled by a diverse group of denominations, making the primacy of any one problematical, and thus necessitating a compromise to democratic reality, we would probably had an established church in this country, as we did in some of the early colonies.

And?

Who can really be surprised by this, given the state of things today?

Sorry, it's just hard to get worked up about this when it's been the case for a long long time.

You'll notice he also didn't mention the satan worshipers, so by the same logic of the Washington Post, by failing to mention it he showed not even "perfunctory inclusion" of the satan worshipers.

YAJ manages to inadvertantly show why I don't worry too overly much about the stupid theocrats in america: they are always too busy hurting each other to do much damage to the rest of us.