I can trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower. That makes me a DAR, a daughter of the American Republic. And as a DAR, I can assure you that one thing the founders of the USA got right was the separation of church and state.
My ancestors came to this continent because they suffered religious persecution in Europe. They were fundamentalist extremists themselves. Each of them were sure that they had the one true understanding of the word of God.
They enforced that belief within their own religiously (pun intended).They were masters of the type of psychological abuse cults still practice to establish and maintain control of their members. Physical abuse like caning and emotional abuse like shunning were their normal.
But they also knew very well the violence that resulted when one of their own had power in the mundane world. and turned that power on those who differed. And they did not want to allow the possibility that some one with a differing absolutist interpretation of the word of God could use the powers of the state to annihilate anyone they decided to on religious grounds.
Permitting elected official to discriminate between people like them and people not like them opens the doors to exactly the kind of religious persecution my ancestors fled.
Trump and the Republican party’ s current brand of state enforced religious extremism have made it clear that they and they alone get to decide just who ‘we, the people’ are. In Trump and the Trumpettes’s view, the only people whose votes should count are PLU’s (people like us).
I want to live in a country that allows me to practice my beliefs as I choose.
I do not know anything about what if any religion Joe Biden or Kamala Harris subscribe to.
And I do not want to know.
I am voting for the principle of separation of church and state that our country was founded on.
sara annon 