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Religious Right groups spend a lot of time beating on church-state separation. TV preacher Pat Robertson once called that constitutional principle "a lie of the left" and said it comes from the old Soviet Constitution....

Take Alan Sears, for example. Sears runs the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the nation's largest Religious Right legal group. He once called the church-state wall "artificial."

Funny, though, how that "artificial" wall that the Religious Right tells us over and over doesn't exist and was never intended by the Founding Fathers can come in handy sometimes - like when the right wing wants to attack yoga in public schools.

In Encinitas, Calif., an attorney named Dean Broyles has filed suit against the Encinitas Union School District, asserting that a voluntary yoga program for students violates church-state separation....

They have no use for separation of church and state when they're trying to inject fundamentalist Christianity into the public schools. When that's their game, they tell the courts, the media and the American people that separation is not a valid legal principle. When they're attacking what they perceive to be school promotion of a religion they don't care for, suddenly the church-state wall is their best friend.

Broyles is arguing that the yoga program violates Article I, Section 4 of the California Constitution. That provision is longer than the federal constitution's First Amendment but essentially provides for the same measure of church-state separation.

It reads in part, "Free exercise and enjoyment of religion without discrimination or preference are guaranteed.... The Legislature shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."....

What bothers me is that the people behind it are raising church-state separation when they normally have no use for that concept. They seem to believe separation should be ignored when conservative Christians want to use public schools and other units of government to promote their faith but applied vigorously to every other religious group.

Sorry, guys, it doesn't work that way. Separation of church and state is the best policy for all religions - and that includes the ones you like best.

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: Bigsqueezer
Follow the money. Christianism is built on fear... Scared people cough up money.

Fear is a very inefficient way of getting money from people, and prone to backfiring. Greed has it beat by a mile. But even leaving that aside, Christians by definition are already "saved". So what do they have to fear? What, precisely, are they so "scared" of in your philosophy?