Netroots Nation Caves to the Freakazoids

In eight years, the liberal blogosphere grew from literally nothing to one of the most powerful political forces on the planet on the strength of one thing: passionate opposition to the warmongering theocracy of the Smirky/Darth administration.

Every time Bush used "god's will" to justify unprovoked war, torture, shredding the Constitution, shitting on treaties, burning the planet to a crisp, drowning New Orleans and sentencing anyone not filthy rich to disease, poverty and death, it spawned a million blog posts.

If not for fighting the good fight defending constitutional separation of church and state against theocratic totalitarianism, the liberal blogosphere would not exist.

Yet now, in the year of its greatest victory, the supposed "leaders" of the liberal blogosphere have decided to suck freakazoid cock.

Netroots Nation, the big lefty political/blogging meeting, is organizing sessions for their conference in August. Unfortunately, they seem have given up on the idea of a secular nation, because this one session on A New Progressive Vision for Church and State has a bizarre description.

The old liberal vision of a total separation of religion from politics has been discredited. Despite growing secularization, a secular progressive majority is still impossible, and a new two-part approach is needed--one that first admits that there is no political wall of separation. Voters must be allowed, without criticism, to propose policies based on religious belief. But, when government speaks and acts, messages must be universal. The burden is on religious believers, therefore, to explain public references like "under God" in universal terms. For example, the word "God" can refer to the ceaseless creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal will help heal culture-war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition.

That makes no sense at all. Separation of church and state certainly isn't discredited — if anything, the experience of the last few years makes it more important than ever. Voters can already propose policies based on religion, and they do, unfortunately…but whoever wrote this thinks there should be no criticism? That's insane. This is a progressive organization that is proposing that we shouldn't even criticize religious intrusion into government.

And then look what they do: they redefine "god" into a waffling, meaningless placeholder for anything anyone wants!

I'd like to know who came up with this garbage — it reeks of the Jim Wallis/Amy Sullivan camp of liberal theocrats, although neither is actually on the panel.

Oh, I can pretty much guarantee that the people who think compromising with the godwallopers is just the coolest idea ever are exactly the same people writing fiery posts about how stupid it is for the Senate Democrats to compromise with republicans on health care reform.

Get a clue, guys. You think repugs are dense obstructionists impervious to reason, facts, logic and reality? Compared to the godbots, James Inhofe is Russ Feingold.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic..