David Brooks Changes the Subject, Again.

Today, David Brooks asserts that those who want to secularize American federal government don't understand that the civil rights movement, with Martin Luther King, could not have happened without religion -- apparently missing the fact that Martin Luther King wasn't part of the federal government. Hey David, Martin Luther King didn't hold elective office and he wasn't enforcing federal policy. In fact, he was fighting federal, and state policy as a private citizen. Good for him that he found support and inspiration from his religion -- but our Federal Government should not, it should draw support and inspiration from our Constitution, and our Constitution only.

Brooks then goes on to say that those who want to remove the part of the oath we know as the Pledge of Allegiance which requires Americans to assert subservience of the United States to God don't realize that we can't beat Al Qaeda without understanding how religion works. Probably true, but understanding how religion works doesn't require we take an oath to being subservient to God. We can take religion classes for that.

Brooks asserts that if we want to fight terrorism, we must be a functionally Christian nation, and that the secular Europeans are failing because they aren't Christian enough. The argument Brooks puts forward is that, if we don't become a theocratic christian nation, we will loose to Islamic terrorists. This is wrong, because the strength of our society is in democratic values and freedom as enshrined in our Constitution, and it is for these values we are under threat from Al Qaeda.