When I became my partys nominee for representative from the 4th congressional district of Virginia, I expected to be spending the next several months engaged in a debate regarding where our republic has been and where it is now headed.
Such a debate is as necessary today as it has ever been. Upon taking control of Congress in 2006, Democrats inherited a budget deficit made possible by four years of Republican spending and a president who had refrained from vetoing any of it for the entirety of his first term. Upon being elected in 2008, President Obama likewise inherited two wars that had already left thousands of American servicemen dead and wounded and the Taliban as strong as it had been since 2001, all at the cost of well over a trillion dollars of unpaid debt that will continue to mount until our troops are withdrawn. Add to all of this an unusually tenacious recession intertwined with massive institutional failures within the financial and real estate sectors, and one would be hard-pressed to name many other U.S. presidents who have been handed a situation as difficult as that which was left to Obama by his unworthy predecessor.
In most other countries, a political party that had conducted itself with such incredible dishonesty and incompetence would not be given yet another chance to govern after having spent a mere two years without control of either of two elected branches of the federal government; but then most countries do not have anything truly equivalent to our Republican Party, which makes up for in message control what it lacks in competence and decency. Thus it is that, with the help of a populist Tea Party movement that claims to favor small government yet which was strangely quiet while Bush and the GOP expanded that same government with new departments and increased spending for which the next generation will have to foot the bill, Republican politicians will most likely take back the House of Representatives this November.
This is the debate I would have liked to have, but things have not worked out that way. For one thing, my opponent Randy Forbes refuses to debate with me on account of the various contradictory reasons hes given to reporters. More fundamentally, many news outlets in my district have decided that this race is not so much about what each of us would do over the next two years, but rather what each of us believes about religion.
Early in the campaign, I made a series of visits to churches in my district in order to answer questions from voters about what I have planned to promote job growth and energy dependence. At some point it became clear that many of the pastors and community leaders I met assumed I was a Christian and that some of them were basing their support for me partly on my supposed religion. The only honest step was to announce that I am in fact an atheist; that announcement cost me some votes, although I was honored that the majority of my religious supporters stuck with me despite our admittedly significant theological differences.
In the historical sense, its ironic that atheists and agnostics are the most distrusted groups in the U.S., a republic established by men who were themselves somewhat distrustful of religion. Thomas Jefferson wrote to a correspondent that he did not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature and that religions are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies. In his own correspondence, John Adams asked, How has it happened that millions of myths, fables, legends, and tales have been blended with Jewish and Christian fables and myths and have made them the most bloody religion that has ever existed? Filled with sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud? Thomas Paine, the great spokesperson of the revolution, wrote an entire book on his absence of religious belief.
The Founders and other early American statesman encoded their preference for a secular state not only in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, then, but also in their own expressed opinions and even in legislative form. In 1797 the Congress unanimously passed and President John Adams signed into law the Treaty of Tripoli, which rightfully states that the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. Nonetheless, my opponent has actually gone so far as to sponsor legislation whereby Congress would affirm that The Holy Bible is Gods Word, a measure so demonstrably unconstitutional that it would have been laughed out of any Supreme Court assembly in American history.
Religious citizens have every right, and even a responsibility, to vote for candidates who share their values. But American values have always been common to both religious and secular Americans, two groups that have long cooperated in making our republic a bastion of liberty and a force for good.
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302