Are you scared yet?  If not you should read this new piece from the Guardian.

With blatant disregard for the first amendment, Republicans’ intolerance of US secularism means things are turning ugly

Dan Kennedy expresses his concerns over the direction of the US Republican party.  The current front runners for the GOP presidential nominee – Nuts.  Here is a sample on Tim Pawlenty the governor of Minnesota.

 Pawlenty trashed anyone who attended “Ivy League schools” or who go to “chablis-drinking, brie-eating parties in San Francisco”. (You can watch Pawlenty’s address at CSPAN.org, starting at the 1:38:30 mark.) It sounded like a parody of Pat Buchanan’s famous 1992 “culture war” speech. Except that Pawlenty is one of the Republicans’ two most plausible candidates for president in 2012.

The sad news continues with Mitt Romney.  You may remember when he tried to throw off the yoke of mormonism.  He called for tolerance between all faiths and threw secular Americans under his campaign bus.

Romney called for tolerance only among believers, explicitly omitting non-believers. “Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me,” Romney said. “And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion – rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.”

Dan Kennedy claims that these may be the least of the worst and talks about Sarah’s request to gOd for a gas pipeline and Huckabee desire to create a nation for christ.

 If you have not seen Sarah Palin asking God to build a natural-gas pipeline in Alaska, well, do yourself a favour right now (see also her recent speech at the Tea Party convention). Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, personifies the Christian right in its purest form. “I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ,” Huckabee said in 1998. There is no reason to think he’s changed his mind.

Mr. Kennedy closes with this thought.

“we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe, the religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to them whose minds have not yielded to the evidence which has convinced us,” wrote James Madison.

Mr. Deity and the baptist