You may know Bill Schneider as a longtime CNN talking head who always had his Democratic talking points down pat. He’s now a professor at George Mason and a “distinguished fellow and resident scholar” at the Third Way Institute. In a lengthy opinion piece in HuffPo, he looks at some of the Republican candidates and their weaknesses.
The piece makes some solid points, but this line about Texas Gov. Rick Perry just drives me nuts:
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It’s true that many politicians cynically use religion to get a political advantage. Perhaps Perry was doing that, as many conservatives do, to make conservative voters like him. Liberals do it too, when they use religion as a justification for government expansion. (You do remember the parable about the Good Samaritan who voted Democratic so that his neighbor could apply for food stamps.)
But we live in a nation where everyone — yes, even politicians — has a right to exercise and express his religion freely. Perry’s participation in that prayer service is no more a blending of Church and State than is President Obama’s occasional church attendance, or his (and all presidents’) customary declaration, “God Bless America.”
You’d think someone with a title like “distinguished” or “scholar” attached to his name would understand at least that much about the First Amendment.
