What's wrong with religion is that it has always enabled people like...

[MarkCharles]

53. Well, then, I stand corrected.

I regret not grasping your point, as you see it, as some uniquely American phenomena.

Perhaps you can start your own thread about how American politics is more influenced by religion than, say, any nation with predominantly Roman Catholics, or than say, the UK and the Church of England.

My thesis has to do with just what the dangers any fanatical religious thought can bring to any popular campaign, peacefully legal or otherwise. I don't restrict it to the United States, nor to political activity alone, be it 9/11, or Northern Ireland, or the Israeli-Arab debacles, religious fanaticism has been behind dozens if not hundreds of humanitarian outrages throughout modern history.

My reading of "American culture" looks back to the founding and Constitutionalizing of a government where separation of church and state was a key element. In a nation so founded with a clause of separation within our First Amendment, it only becomes noteworthy that we have enabled such fanatical religious efforts toward restrictions upon, for example, women's freedoms to become center stage in a desperate last gasp of the privileged to retain their power by invoking such blatant religious bigotry in the forefront of campaigning. True, only in America, can we see our nation's Constitutional intent contrasted so boldly against religiously justified political skulduggery personified in Rick Santorum or Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann, to name just the most recent egregious examples.

In other nations, where religious privilege is enshrined within the governmental functions, (the UK, for example), the noteworthiness of the contrast between religion's overreach and governmental control is less spectacular, more of an accepted societal norm, stretching back centuries. Or more radically, we see that Muslim nations simply employ religion as the sole justification for any number of actions to limit human rights and freedoms, or as justifications for attacking others either within their own nation, or elsewhere worldwide. Rick Santorum's bold fanaticism pales in comparison to those of many other religious and political leaders worldwide, and perhaps, only because he is an American, where we are supposed to live under a Constitution prohibiting such religious control over our lives, only because we are here, does his outrageous behavior, based upon his religious beliefs, make headlines here and worldwide.