Rick Santorum Helps Me Make Up My Mind

I'm voting for Mitt Romney. We already have a president with no respect for the Constitution. We don't need another one.

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” he told ABC News. “The idea that church can have no influence or involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.”

This should cook his goose with conservatives (and everybody else), Catholic and Protestant alike, but it probably won’t. Many voters are as ignorant as Rick Santorum about the plain meaning of the First Amendment. Mr. Santorum, no doubt listening to his inner rogue, says the First Amendment’s guarantee of “the free exercise of religion means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square.”

Indeed it does, and the pope, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, all the Methodist and Episcopal bishops, rabbis Orthodox and otherwise, and peaceful imams everywhere have the right to be heard. But none of them has the right, as arbiters of their faith, to compel the president of the United States to make public policy conform to religious doctrine. This is what makes America the exceptional nation. This is what Mr. Santorum appears to not understand.

John F. Kennedy, addressing the concern of the Protestant ministers of Houston in 1963, set the standard for how Catholic candidates for president (and other public office) should answer questions about how his faith would guide his secular presidency.

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” JFK said, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote, where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”