I'm sorry if I pulled your chain, but anyone in this country who is more worried about some religious government takeover of our society, than they are about the overwhelming and increasing power the government already has over our secular lives, has got to be looking at the wrong picture. Hello? A bit of perspective here?

You said in your post that our government had been "coopted"--your word--by a particular denomination. There is no evidence of this "cooption" expressed in any major government policy.

You have expressed some concerns about the Patriot Act, many of them valid ones. But the Patriot Act has nothing to do with religion.

How many people in our country have actually been threatened by a religion? You read about a few crackpots who try to ban Harry Potter, or close bars on Sundays. The biggest church/state flap in America this year has been some judge trying to get a display of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse.

I think what pissed a lot of people off when Bush came into office and made his appointments was not that he was threatening to impose any kind of theocracy, but that he, and some of his appointees, had a religion and actually acknowledged it. Not like Bill Clinton, who could leave a church service on camera and be screwing around on his wife the same morning. Not like politicians who claim to be orthodox Catholics but support abortion on demand. Why a person who prays and means it bothers some people is beyond me.

Again, I get the idea you live in a very strange place out East, judging by the religious loonies that constantly pop up in your posts. I live in California, and before that in the Midwest, and in my entire adult life have never had my rights violated, or even been seriously inconvenienced, by another person or group on religious grounds.* And there are a LOT of religions around here.

The last time something came up in this context where I live was a controversy over whether some Orthodox Jews up in Palo Alto could run a length of string between public phone polls to create a symbolic border for some reason. Oh, and there was a flap over some Sikh kid carrying a knife (Sikhs carry a ceremonial knife--a "kirpan." In the case of kids, it's often a symbolic one that couldn't cut butter.)

The same lack of interference is certainly not true for secular government. I have not been required to pay half my income to the church. No religion forces me to do anything under physical penalty. The secular government does. In real-world terms, Ted Kennedy has a lot more control over the life of a Catholic than the Pope does. The Pope does not have a gun. If he did, a Catholic could be fined or jailed for using birth control. When was the last time anyone in America even got excommunicated from the Catholic church?

The fact that churches and governments were entwined three hundred years ago means nothing in this discussion.

Does this all boil down to abortion? I can't think of any other aspect where religious belief has a potential large impact on secular life. Is this an individual rights issue that overwhelms all the others? To hear some feminists talk, you'd think Washington crossed the Delaware for the right to vacuum a uterus.

I really don't want you to bail out of this board--it's already overbalanced in the conservative direction, and hence getting a bit boring.

*Okay, maybe the Jehovah's Witnesses at the door are inconvenient, but unlike Federal marshalls, they don't pack heat.