Veni, vidi, veto

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

-Thomas Jefferson, 1813-


Perhaps our founding fathers thought they had dealt a knockout blow to the influence of religion on government when they wrote our constitution. They certainly tried and they certainly were passionate about depicting that influence as a form of tyranny and a disruption of the natural rights of man. I’m not sure they could imagine, given the level of technology of the late 18th century, a decision based on determining whether a certain single celled organism had a soul or not, but I’m sure the intent was to prevent the government from making statements about what we should or must believe about souls as defined by Christians or any other religious organizations.

Yet here we are over 200 years later, competent to explain what the processes, mechanisms and molecular structures are that define life, to explain exactly why this cell can be made into a rabbit and that into a woman, yet being ruled by that same “tyranny over the mind of man” that Jefferson called organized religion.

George W. Bush, having little mind at all, surrounded himself with dog collared enemies of freedom and squashed the bill passed by elected representatives of the people that would have eased restrictions on scientific research. This because it might interfere with the magic transit of magic, insubstantial and immortal entities into a magic kingdom enabled by a magic ceremony. They are afraid God, in his wisdom, might throw those sinning protozoan souls into hell. Thus, with as casual a stroke of the pen as he uses to condemn someone to die, he wrote religion into law.

Such was never the intent of our constitution. Souls, heavens and hells are a religious construct devoid of evidence and contrary to everything we know and accept and making law based on belief in them is a de facto establishment of religion. The question of whether the President cares about the constitution; whether the president is too stupid to notice the infringement; whether the president needs the votes of the religiously demented too much or whether the voices that he admits to hearing tell him to veto stem cell research may be moot. We simply don’t have the freedom to say no to religion; a freedom guaranteed by the constitution.

According to an AP article, Bush managed to find 18 women to attend the veto who had volunteered to have some unused bits of microscopic matter inserted where the sun don’t shine so that with God’s blessing, they can grow into living and fully loaded with inherited sin human beings that can have their souls saved only by a ceremony.

And all the while people were dying.