Louie Gohmert: ‘Separation of church and state’ means ‘church plays a role in the state’
Source: Raw Story
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said this week that the constitutional separation between church and state was meant to be a “one-way wall” where the “church plays a role in the state.”
In a World Net Daily-sponsored promotion for an upcoming Christian TV event called “Washington – A Man of Prayer,” Gohmert recalled that the U.S. House of Representatives once met in what is now known as National Statuary Hall.
“On Sundays this became the largest non-denominational Christian church in the Washington, D.C. area,” he explained. “People came in here and prayed, they sang hymns, they worshipped God. It was part of our history.”
Gohmert pointed out that a Congressional Research Service report revealed that President Thomas Jefferson, who coined the phrase “separation of church and state,” had also attended church services at Statuary Hall.
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/01/louie-gohmert-separation-of-church-and-state-means-church-plays-a-role-in-the-state/
“Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.”
― Thomas Jefferson
= new reply since forum marked as read
great analogy..
Although I haven't even been at a bus stop in..decades.. I can relate it to the Green Line...
or gohmerroids, perhaps?
someone I know who insists our founding fathers created us as a Christian nation.
Nothing I wrote or quoted deterred her. It was very frustrating.
granted, DU's been such a hostile place for such a while now, maybe so...
Just saying, Gohmert doesn't deserve to be compared to Gomer 
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means I should actually allow it to poke out of my shirt collar, frequently being mistaken for my head.
Ah...the fierce, burning intelligence in those eyes...
Last edited Wed Apr 2, 2014, 01:55 AM - Edit history (1)
Jefferson was nominally an Episcopalian, but he liked the Unitarian religion, was an admirer of Unitarian pastor Joseph Priestly and prepared an edition of the Bible called the Jefferson Bible which omits all the myths and presents the quotations from Jesus and the barest of other New Testament passages.
Gohmert does not know or understand his Jefferson.
Here is a letter from Jefferson to Priestly. I doubt that Gohmert could read it much less understand it. Jefferson considered Jesus to be a deist:
Dear Sir,--While on a short visit lately to Monticello, I received from you a copy of your comparative view of Socrates & Jesus, and I avail myself of the first moment of leisure after my return to acknolege the pleasure I had in the perusal of it, and the desire it excited to see you take up the subject on a more extensive scale. In consequence of some conversation with Dr. Rush, in the year 1798--99, I had promised some day to write him a letter giving him my view of the Christian system. I have reflected often on it since, & even sketched the outlines in my own mind. I should first take a general view of the moral doctrines of the most remarkable of the antient philosophers, of whose ethics we have sufficient information to make an estimate, say of Pythagoras, Epicurus, Epictetus, Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, Antoninus. I should do justice to the branches of morality they have treated well; but point out the importance of those in which they are deficient.
I should then take a view of the deism and ethics of the Jews, and show in what a degraded state they were, and the necessity they presented of a reformation. I should proceed to a view of the life, character, & doctrines of Jesus, who sensible of incorrectness of their ideas of the Deity, and of morality, endeavored to bring them to the principles of a pure deism, and juster notions of the attributes of God, to reform their moral doctrines to the standard of reason, justice & philanthropy, and to inculcate the belief of a future state, This view would purposely omit the question of his divinity, & even his inspiration. To do him justice, it would be necessary to remark the disadvantages his doctrines have to encounter, not having been committed to writing by himself, but by the most unlettered of men, by memory, long after they had heard them from him; when much was forgotten, much misunderstood,& presented in very paradoxical shapes. Yet such are the fragments remaining as to show a master workman, and that his system of morality was the most benevolent & sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the antient philosophers. His character & doctrines have received still greater injury from those who pretend to be his special disciples, and who have disfigured and sophisticated his actions & precepts, from views of personal interest, so as to induce the unthinking part of mankind to throw off the whole system in disgust, and to pass sentence as an impostor on the most innocent, the most benevolent, the most eloquent and sublime character that ever has been exhibited to man.
. . . .
http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/135/Letter_from_Thomas_Jefferson_to_Joseph_Priestley_1.html
And,
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 to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813..
-Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom
http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789 (Richard Price had written to TJ on Oct. 26. about the harm done by religion and wrote "Would not Society be better without Such religions? Is Atheism less pernicious than Demonism?"
http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814
http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm
There are more, but this is especially for Gohmert:
Priests...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Correa de Serra, April 11, 1820
http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm
Louis Gohmert is the sort of ignoramus that Jefferson would have shunned.
Ever.
The mind boggles. 
