Well, we’re a bit late to the party, but this was just too good to pass up: Illinois Democratic state representative Monique Davis telling an atheist activist testifying before the Assembly that

“it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!”

and yelled at him to get out of his seat and leave, that he had no right to be there.

Wow, so wrong so many different ways. Plenty has already been said — and it pretty well speaks for itself — so I’ll leave it at that. Read and hear the entire exchange; she gets pretty worked up. Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune has a good roundup.

Big bull evangelical James Dobson tells the rabid-right-o-sphere that he’d rather not vote than to vote for John McCain. In a statement released to the Laura Ingraham show, Dobson says:

But what a sad and melancholy decision this is for me and many other conservatives. Should John McCain capture the nomination as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime. I certainly can’t vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama based on their virulently anti-family policy positions. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life.

Dobson cites McCain’s devilish record on stem cell research, his position on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and his foul mouthed ways as reasons for his decision. Read more and hear Ingraham read the statement at Talking Points Memo.

When South Korea’s president-elect was mayor of Seoul, he said the city was a holy place governed by God. He’s been associated with Korean evangelicals who pray at their monster rallies for the destruction of all Buddhist temples in Korea. The mega-church he attends is chock full of other government officials. Read more at the Asia Times.

God in the White House — a new book from religious historian, episcopal priest and editor-at-large of Chrisitanity Today, Randall Balmer — explores the history and the consequences of the “religionization” of the presidency from John F Kennedy through George W. Bush. From an excerpt offered at npr.org:

… [E]xamples suggest that the quest for moral rectitude in presidential candidates may be chimerical. The candidates’ declarations of faith over the past several decades provide a fairly poor indicator of how they govern. Even the record of the two redeemer presidents of the past half century, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, is mixed. Carter actually sought to govern according to his moral lights and in fidelity to the principles of decency, honor, and fair play that he articulated on the campaign trail; the American voters resoundingly repudiated him when he ran for a second term.

Bush sought the presidency on a platform of morality and Christian virtues. Yet his policies in the first decade of the twenty-first century reflected those values only dimly, if at all. Perhaps it’s time to shift our attention away from the candidates and toward the electorate. What is it we expect from our presidents? Do we look for charisma and political skills, experience in foreign and domestic policy, and administrative competence? Or do we demand that candidates for the White House pass some sort of catechetical test? It’s not an either-or proposition, of course, but the record of the last four decades of the twentieth century suggests that we’ve moved toward the latter and away from the former.

But at what cost?…

Read the complete excerpt, “Cheap Grace: Piety and the Presidency” at npr.org.

Randall Balmer is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.

CNN: American Academy of Religion is noodling the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Politico: Dean says Jews can go to heaven.

Newsweek: No communion or Presidency for Giuliani say Catholic Bishops.

Mitt Romeny — whose religion accounts for just 2 percent of the US population — says there will be no Muslims in his cabinet, according to an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, because “based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified.” Read more at the CSM.

Of course now that he’s being called on it, Romney is in full denial mode. But talkingpointsmemo’s Josh Marshall explains it all to us (4 mins 30 secs):

More pandering trouble for Obama. From Earl Offari Hutchinson at the Huffington Post:

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama ripped a page straight from the Bush campaign playbook with his announced upcoming three date barnstorm tour through South Carolina with notorious gay basher, gospel singer Donnie McClurkin. The Grammy winning black gospel singer’s last effort on the political scene was his song and shill for Bush’s reelection at the Republican National Convention in 2004. Obama has hitched his string to McClurkin’s high flying gay bash kite in part out of religious belief (he purports to be somewhat of an evangelical), in bigger part because he’s falling further and further behind Hillary Clinton with the black vote in South Carolina and everywhere else, and in the biggest part of all because he hopes that what worked for Bush’s reelection will work for him.

Read more here.

The well-conceived Politifact.com calls Mike Huckabee on his claim that a majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were “clergy.” In fact, only one of 56 was a clergyman. From Politifact: “We’d like to give Huckabee every benefit of the doubt, but even if you consider former clergymen among the signers the best you could come up with is four. Out of 56. That’s not “most,” that’s Pants-on-Fire wrong.” Read more.

BTW: Politifact is a cool and useful site from the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, dedicated to a factual analysis of presidential candidates’ statements and ads. Learn more about it and its nifty truth-o-meter here and check it often. [Thanks Val and TPM]

The FRC Christian Right Summit Straw Poll Results as reported by the AP. The question: Which is the following candidates for president would you be most likely to vote for?

From the New York Times comes this quote from Mitt Romney’s speech to right-wing Christian activists at the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Summit”:

I want to make sure my attorney general defends the free exercise of religion in this country. The effort to establish an anti-religion in America, the anti-religion of secularism, has got to come to an end. We are a nation under God, and we do place our trust in Him.”

And P.S. Showing good old Christian Right-Wing political values, the Romney campaign is urging supporters to stack the “Values Summit” straw poll. Read the story at the Baltimore Sun.

P.P.S. The odious Bob Jones III, chancellor of the odious fundamentalist Bob Jones University — yes that’s the BJ-U that’s infamous for its anti-Catholic rhetoric and ban on interracial dating — says Romney is the man for the job. Read more at the god-o-meter.

This weekend’s Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Summit” promises to be a real wince-o-matic source of telling quotes. Friday’s best/worst comes from Fred Thompson:

People ask me, ‘What would you do in the first 100 days in office?’ I don’t really know. But I’ve said to my wife that I know what I’d do in the first hour: Go into the [oval] office and pray for the wisdom to know what the right thing to do was.” [thanks god-o-meter]

It seems to me that in this one quote he pretty much sums up all the reasons not to vote for him: He doesn’t “really know” what it is he will do as president and he’s going to ask Zeus for an answer. Scary.

Also interesting: When Wolf Blitzer asks FRC prez Tony Perkins if Mormonism is a Christian religion, he replied: “Well, I mean clearly it’s different than the Christian faith. It is not a brand of evangelicalism, it is not a brand of the Christian faith. It is a different faith altogether.”

Declareyourdisbelief’s own “Freethinking is the American Way” design now graces goods at the Disbelief Boutique. Own one today.

More goods coming soon! Be sure to check in often.

Take them to court. From the The Christian Science Monitor covering the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and its primary cause — shining light on and stopping Dominionist Christian proselytization in the armed forces:

At Speicher base in Iraq, US Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.

Months earlier, Hall charges, he had been publicly berated by a staff sergeant for not agreeing to join in a Thanksgiving Day prayer.

On Sept. 17, the soldier and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed suit against Army Maj. Freddy Welborn and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, charging violations of Hall’s constitutional rights, including being forced to submit to a religious test to qualify as a soldier.

Read more at CSM.

Dan Rather covers the same subject on his hd.net show. Click here to see the show at hd.net.

Click here to see nonbelieving soldier Jeremy Hall’s court filing.

CNN reports that on Sunday, Barak Obama closed a stump speech to 4,000 members of the Redemption World Outreach Center mega-media mega-evangelical mega-church with the line “I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

The Kingdom quote got a lot of people riled up in the blogosphere and I have to admit it was disturbing to me. For disbelievers, the Christian Kingdom he’s evoking shares more with The Caliphate than with the secular ideals of American Democracy. And it’s doubly disturbing because it’s just a phrase that I would never want my president to use — an idea I don’t want the American president paying lipservice to — no matter what crowd he’s pitching to.

Andrew Sullivan tells us, oh, don’t worry about it, Barak’s not of that Bush-Dobson brand, he’s more of the Niebuhr-Tillich brand so it’s okay, he wasn’t really calling for The Kingdom. After all, he was in a church grubbing for votes and he’s really a much more subtle philosophy reading guy — so no worries.

The thing is, I’m not disturbed because I believe Obama wants The Kingdom, the Christian Kingdom right here in the USA. I don’t believe that this Harvard academic star, this worldly man with Muslim relatives wants the Christian Kingdom on earth. What I believe is that he is beginning to be willing to say anything to anyone to get elected. And that’s got me worried, and a little pissed off, because I had had the audacity to hope — after his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 — that he wasn’t going to be that kind of candidate.

On Friday, George Bush appeared to embrace the universal godhead, telling Al Arabiya: “Well, first of all, I believe in an almighty God, and I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God. That’s what I believe.” Read more at WhiteHouse.gov.

Since the 1940s, Dr. Bronner sent the same message on his famous soap bottle labels: “Our Brother’s teacher of the Moral ABC, mason-tent-sandalmaker Hillel taught carpenter Jesus to unite all mankind free! All-One-God-Faith, as teach African shepherd-astronomers Abraham & Israel for 6,000 years since yr.1 Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One. All-one. Exceptions eternally? None!”