High Stakes for Church and State Separation

Of all the issues that could be significant in the 2012 presidential election, the future of church-state separation hasn’t gotten much attention. It should however, because in the Republican primaries so far, it’s striking how vigorously nearly all of the candidates—and not just those favored by the Tea Party—have questioned the constitutional basis of the separation of church and state.

From Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry to Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, the leading candidates have endorsed a Tea Party vision of religious supremacy, which holds that the Supreme Court in the 1960s was wrong to prevent the government from sponsoring sectarian prayers in school and other open endorsements of religion over secularism. Since the next president could appoint a Supreme Court justice who might tilt the Court further to the right on matters of church-state separation, the stakes for religious freedom in the election could hardly be higher.
Read more here