"In recent years," Romney said, "the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America--the religion of secularism. They are wrong." By "they," he means everyone who opposes attempts by the politicians from the religious Right to impose their personal beliefs on all Americans.

Mitt Romney is an utter hypocrite. As governor of Massachusetts, he was pro-choice and
pro-gay rights. He wouldn't have been elected in Massachusetts had he run on a right-wing religious platform. He has only adopted conservative religious policy positions since he started running for the Republican presidential nomination.

"We do not insist on a single strain of religion," he said. "Rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith." It is a symphony, of course, that does not include me or anyone else who believes in separation of church and state--the unique combination of secular government and religious liberty that was America's founding gift to its own people and the world.

In his speech, Romney also quoted the fiery Massachusetts patriot Samuel Adams, who spoke in favor of official prayer at the First Continental Congress, in 1774. This was the same Sam Adams who, in 1803, wrote his old friend Thomas Paine and chided him for promoting religious "infidelity" in his great book, The Age of Reason. Paine's reply is a classic of freethought, and I leave you with his words:

"What then," Paine asked, "...is this thing called infidelity? If we go back to your ancestors and mine three or four hundred years ago, for we must have had fathers and grandfathers or we should not be here, we shall find them praying to Saints and Virgins, and believing in purgatory and Transubstantiation, and therefore all of us are infidels according to our forefathers' belief....

"...Every sectary, except the Quakers, had been a persecutor. Those who fled from persecution persecuted in their turn, and it is this that has filled the world with persecution and deluged it with blood."

It is our secular government, our separation of church and state, that has largely preserved America from the rest of the world's experience of bloody religious persecution. Mitt Romney doesn't understand the first thing about the principles of the founding fathers, who combined belief in freedom of conscience for everyone (including those Romney sneeringly dismisses for their secularism) with insistence on a government based not on divine authority but on human reason and the rights of man.

Romney is unfit to be president not because he is a Mormon but because he is yet another pandering politician who denigrates America's separation of church and state and jumps on the right-wing, faith-based bandwagon.