Judeo-Christian

I recently happened to stumble across a New York Times piece in which David Brooks and Gail Collins debated what the Tea Partiers are so mad about. In it, David Brooks, defending them (relatively speaking, since he claims not to be a fan of the Beckheads), claimed that they just want the country to return to its Judeo-Christian ethos. He said it like it was perfectly reasonable, and not at all a form of racism or xenophobia or bigotry.

Well, sorry, Mr. Brooks, but some of us don't like the idea of a "Judeo-Christian ethos." In fact, for some of us, the idea of instituting such a principle in this country is one of the things we *least* like about the Tea Party. If you listen to Markos Moulitsas' description of what he means when he calls the current far-right in this country the "American Taliban," he means specifically that they want to enforce religious doctrines on their society, like the Taliban. It's a subset of bigotry: only about 77.2% of American adults say they are either Christian or Jewish, and if I were to be generous and include the other religious group that worships the same god and considers itself to be in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Islam, the number grows only to 77.8. And the other 22.2%, including the 15.0% of American adults who report themselves as "None," aren't necessarily okay with considering various supposedly desirable personality traits like a good work ethic or thriftiness or whatever to be "Judeo-Christian." And that appears to be something that David Brooks just isn't willing to admit as reasonable. We're a pluralistic society, and one that officially, right there in the very first part of the very first Amendment, denounces official state religions. Most of the Founding Fathers were deists anyway, which isn't exactly traditional Judeo-Christianity. So this is juts a load of bull, and a backhanded attempt to vindicate the true goals of these American theocrats. I'm not having it.