. . . Why laws like this are considered a problem.

It’s not YOUR country. It’s OUR country (as in yours and mine). You say “GET OUT,” but where would we go, and why should we be the ones to leave?

Laws like this, and responses like yours, feed the gnawing suspicion that some atheists (and members of other minorities) have, that we’re only barely tolerated, that we’re not welcome in the only home we’ve ever known, that the majority secretly despises us and wishes to use our civic institutions to do us harm.

Paranoid? Most of the time I think so, but there are times, when the laws are nakedly discriminatory, and when the majority seems so reluctant to stick up for the minority, and when the majority’s fringes use the minority’s discomfort to vent its vitriol, that I think maybe it’s not so paranoid after all.

What’s especially frustrating about this case is that so many Christians automatically line up against atheists, regardless of the merits of the case. This law is a flagrant violation of the first ammendment, and not in an “atheists get weird at any mention of God” kind of way.

Even if you think the founders were fundamentalist Christians, it is undeniable that, at the very least, the establisment clause was meant to protect individual Christian theologies and denominations from each other. This law is not simply a variation of “in god we trust,” but a government sponsoring of a specific, strong, controversial theological interpretation – that God actively intervenes in human affairs, takes an interest in specific political conflicts, and makes concrete material promises to people who believe in him.

This is not only not vanilla theism. It’s not vanilla Christianity. This is a specific doctrine that is being espoused. Even if you believe that atheists have not standing in the public sphere, this is a constitutional violation.

(I write more about this on my blog).

I think the citizens have, or at least should have, good standing in this case. If the citizens themselves can’t challenge idiocy like this in our state and national governments, who can? At best it is taxpayer dollars going to pay the salaries of those who are wasting their time on this nonsense, and at worst is discriminatory against any atheists that may now or in the future work in the Ky State government. Forced to acknowledge ‘almighty God’ my foot!

Besides that, if this went unchallenged, you just know the religious right would have a field day in using this law to ‘prove’ that this is a ‘Christian Nation’, just as they now use the phrase ‘under God’ in the pledge. We can’t just let it go unchallenged.

You are correct: there is no war on Christmas. T’was sarcasm on my part.

Merry Christmas, mate.

-JBM

On another note, I can’t help from thinking how others’ fervent beliefs in their god got us into this need for homeland security thing in the first place. I don’t recall any secularist attackers or other threats (beyond our perennial “War on Christmas”) that justified such measures in this county.

-jbm