Should Obama have Picked Rick Warren for Inauguration?

You Should Try Actually Reading Your Constitution

Even your organization's name has it all wrong... Nowhere within any of our founding documents are the phrases or concepts of "Freedom From Religion" found. Neither will you find the separation of Church and State a concept engraved upon the soul of that document or its amendments. The first amendment simply provides for those with a religious desire to exercise that freely. The actual wording states:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

For once in your life take a look at that statement and read it for what it actually says, not what you hope it to say. It simply says Congress shall make no law establishing an official religion, nor shall it make any law prohibiting the practicing of any religion. Your own bias and misguided view of the document places a non-existent restraint on the ability of any government official to choose how they wish to exercise their own faith, whatever it may be, so long as they do not establish it as an official religion of the nation.

I know you as an organization are not so ignorant that you do not know the history of the phrase "separation of church and state." I can only conclude then that it is with willful malice that you seek to mislead my fellow countrymen as to the intentions of the Constitution of these United States and the Amendments thereto. You must look, in context, at the message from Jefferson the Danbury Baptists and realize that the "wall of separation" mentioned has more to do with assuring those in that religious minority that the Government would let them be and allow them to worship as they saw fit than it has to do with whether or not the Government itself was allowed, in any way, to worship or pay respects to any deity, most likely at the time to be the God of the Christians.

To prove my point I will end my rebuttal to your answer with the actual text of the letters, which show unerringly the meaning behind Jefferson's words and will hopefully clarify the subject for many of my fellow citizens of these great United States.

In an 1802 letter from Thomas Jefferson as sitting President to the Danbury Baptists:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their "legislature" should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties."

Writing to another church, the Virginia Baptists, he wrote in 1808:

"We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries."

Clearly we can see by the actual texts of the Constitution, the First Amendment and the letters where the separation of church and state is a fallacious idea and should not be propagated any further.

I will, as a Christian and an American, always fight for the right of any Muslim, Hindu, Agnostic, Atheist and any other religion to practice that religion freely, regardless of their status or station within our government, so long as they don't force me to participate with them. Which by the way, having an "Evangelical" Christian preside over an inaugural prayer is not forcing anyone to participate, simply don't listen, or listen but disagree with anything he says, the choice is yours, freely to make.