Founders Keepers

By Bill Maher

Republicans love to tout the Founders and the Constitution, but when it comes to the part about the government not getting involved in promoting one religion over another, or promoting religion at all for that matter, they seem to think the Founders were a bunch of assholes who got it wrong.

The Tennessee House of Representatives just passed a bill to make the Holy Bible the official state book of Tennessee. Also, in Tennessee, as Ed Mazza reports in The Huffington Post, an atheist mother has been receiving online threats ever since “her complaint led to the cancellation of school visits by a preacher nicknamed Bible Man.” In her complaint filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, she said Bible Man would come to the local public elementary school about once a month and present “baby Jesus displays, sermons proclaiming that 'Jesus died on the cross for our sins,’ Bible readings, discussions about the meaning of Bible stories, and distributions of religious literature.”  Sounds fairly nondenominational to me.

In the Oklahoma Senate, they added the Christian touch to a bill regulating ridesharing programs like Uber by removing language that would have prevented drivers from refusing rides to passengers simply because they were gay or transgender. Republican Jason Smalley, who removed the language, told the AP, “I believe if a private business owner wants to serve or not serve an individual, they have that purview…”

What’s interesting is that both Tennessee and Oklahoma have had either ballot measures or actual laws passed to ban Sharia Law. It seems they think the government can endorse and even promote religion as long as it’s the right one. And the right one is established by majority rule. My religion gets to be the state book, gets taught in schools and is encoded into our taxi app laws. But yours? Yours gets banned outright. Just like the Founders envisioned.