The Last Despised Minority

This shouldn't be a surprise, coming from the man who thinks his job as the number-one law enforcement official in the Commonwealth of Kentucky is to spend millions of taxpayer dollars arguing in court that Kentuckians don't need no steenkin' laws cuz an invisible sky wizard does magic for us.

From the Herald:

Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Jack Conway questions the religious faith of his Republican opponent, Rand Paul, in a new television ad launched Saturday.

“Why was Rand Paul a member of a secret society that calls the Holy Bible a hoax …?” asks the ad. “Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up. Tell her to bow down before a false idol and say his God was Aqua Buddha?”

Paul’s campaign immediately attacked the ad, saying Conway “stepped way over the line” in “a shameful and despicable ad that questions Dr. Paul’s Christian faith.”

Paul said in a statement that he is a “pro-life Christian” who has “never written or spoken anything that would indicate otherwise.”

Paul is a member of The Presbyterian Church of Bowling Green, where his wife Kelley is a deacon.

The Conway campaign said Paul needs to explain why he joined a secret society in college after the president of Baylor University banned it in 1978, two years before Paul attended the Texas school, because it “made fun of not only the Baptist religion, but Christianity and Christ.”

Paul is, of course, a Mitch McConnell/Jim Demint repug, more than happy to carry water for corporations, Wall Street, the obscenely wealthy and the Xian Taliban. That's disgusting, depressing and un-American, but unfortunately neither illegal nor unconstitutional.

Attorney General Jack Conway, however, by attacking Paul's religious belief, is flouting the Constitutional prohibition on establishing a religious test for political office.

In that ad, Conway is saying that Rand Paul is not qualified to be a U.S. Senator because he is not Christian enough.

That is an absolutely outrageous thing for anyone who calls himself an American to say. It is despicable.

As I have written before, I think that belief in the efficacy of prayers to an invisible sky wizard of any denomination is sufficient proof of rational incompetence to bar anyone from any position of responsibility.

I would love to have the opportunity to vote for a candidate who proudly declares her atheism and insists that devotion to reality makes her a better candidate than a christian or muslim or jew or hindu or buddhist whose belief in a myth trumps facts, logic and reason.

But I would never declare a candidate unqualified for office for not being freakazoid enough.

(The last despised minority is, of course, rational thinkers. Otherwise known as atheists.)