The "Compassion" Forum: A Faith-based Blowjob

I dunno about the corpoRat SCUM (So Called Unbiased Media), cuz I mainly ignore them. But NPR was FULL of it this morning. I stood about two minutes of it before having to re-swallow my regurgitating coffee and turn on the cd player. I usually listen to the NPR talk schedule in the morning, and it's been all over those segments too. It was revolting. Disgusting. It was as close to a public religious litmus test as is possible...and don't forget, goddam it, that's Un-fucking-Constitutional. The religious beliefs of the candidates are of no concern to the (Yes, secular, goddam it) electorate It's in the fucking book.

Over on Buzzflash, commentator/Fifth Columnist PM Carpenter has remarked on it, too. I excerpt it below the fold; HERE'S THE LINKEE if ya wanna read it all.

No matter what else happens between now and November I'll give John McCain credit for at least one act of wisdom: He refused to attend that anticonstitutional abomination -- the misnomered "Compassion Forum" -- on CNN last night. It was the closest thing yet to a religious test, which the U.S. Constitution does not specifically ban, but does frown on pointedly: none "shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

We are treading on perilous ground. We have, for the first time to my knowledge, now lined up major candidates for the U.S. presidency and grilled them on personal, religious faith. The founders would have been appalled, and for good reason. It is precisely the kind of church-state entanglement that severed and factionalized Europe for centuries -- something the founders hoped to avoid by establishing the world's "first wholly secular state," as one scholar of the early American republic has put it.

But you wouldn't have been reminded of our secular founding from watching the "Compassion Forum," sponsored last night by Pennsylvania's Messiah College and characterized this morning by the NY Times as "an exercise in earnestness on pressing moral and social issues, a 90-minute break from the political thrust and parry of the presidential campaign trail" in which "candidates ... address[ed] religious beliefs in at times starkly personal terms."

There's more, none of it any less depressing--or any less true. Not only does this endanger public discourse (whatever there is of that left), but it virtually assures that no one who does not submit to the dominant superstition--about white-bearded boogey-men lurking like jilted pedophiliac lovers in heaven to strike down the dubious--cannot. as a practical matter, be a considered aas a candidate for the office of President--and by implication, any other.
This has gone far enough. Fuck, it's gone too far, WAAAAAY too fucking far.

Btw: Here's the relevant Constitutional Text.

Article VI, 3rd paragraph

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Chuy........