BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR!

A lesson is learned on the floor of the Senate; but will the Religious Right Take Notice?


The sight of a Hindu clergyman saying the US Senate's traditional morning prayer was too much for members of a Christian group, who yesterday tried to shout him down before being arrested.

As Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple, offered the prayer, two women and a man began shouting "this is an abomination" from the gallery.

The trio continued to yell at the Hindu cleric as they were taken away in handcuffs by police, yelling, "no Lord but Jesus Christ!" and "there's only one true God!". The male protester told the Associated Press, "we are Christians and patriots".

Police identified the protesters as Ante and Katherine Pavkovic and their daughter Kristen, members of a Christian organization called Operation Save America/Operation Rescue.

The group said in a statement: "The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the one true god, Jesus Christ. This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers."

Reverend Flip Benham, the leader of the group, said: "Not one senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the gospel of Jesus Christ! There were three in the audience with the courage to stand and proclaim, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me'."

Once more, a valuable lesson is dumped into our laps; an opportunity to see what happens when the lines between Church and State are blurred. The Christian Right's encroachment on civil liberties and their insistence on rewriting history books - they have a particular fascination for the founding fathers - has now come full circle. In what can only be described as the irony of the decade a religious group about as 180 from Christianity as any religious group can be, took to the floor of the Senate to exercise its freedom of religious expression and was met by a strong dose of reality. In this increasingly myopic nation of ours, freedom of religious expression is reserved for those whom God has chosen. The zealots who run the Republican party would have you believe that the actions taken by this lunatic organization were justified because the Hindu god is a non-monotheistic god, not consistent with the Judaic / Christian God of the bible. That's code for, no God but ours. Apparently religious freedom only counts when it concurs with the beliefs of the majority. So much for a Republic.

None of this surprises me. I have been saying this now for two years. We are witnessing the birth of the Imperial Presidency, and the growing emergence of a theocracy. I don't care whether you agree with Hinduism or not, or even whether you agree that it should be allowed on the floor of the Senate. What is at stake here is far more serious than a simple prayer.

We all saw what happened in Germany when learned men stood by and let a bunch of thugs hijack a nation by rewriting its history, and then "silencing" anyone who challenged the authority of its new authors. DO NOT think it cannot happen here. This isn't about Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, or any other religion you care to name; it's about the legacy of a nation founded by men who knew all too well the perils of a state dominated by religious oppression, whose leaders considered themselves ordained by God Almighty to rule without question. Above all else, they wanted to avoid a repeat of that very same system in this new country they had formed. This bold, new experiment is called the United States of America, and the document they wrote to protect us from just such a system is called a Constitution. And that Constitution does NOT, contrary to what the Religious Right says, care which religion you belong to. ALL are welcome, and ALL are free to express and practice their beliefs free from persecution and ridicule.


"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." These historic words taken from our Declaration of Independence illustrate plainly the difference between a constitutional form of government and a monarchy. In the former, the government gets its power from the governed; in the latter it is derived from God. No matter what the zealots on the Right say as they pervert our history, the United States is NOT, and was NEVER intended to be, a Christian state. Such a state would have been inconsistent with the ideals and values of our founding fathers.

When you worship at your local church, you have the same rights as the Jew, the Hindu, the Buddhist, or the Muslim: the right to worship your God in your own way. There is no other country like this, and I will be damned if I'm going to let a bunch of religious Nazis steal away my heritage.