Holy elections!

Remember Katherine Harris? \nIn case you didn't vote in the 2000 elections, let me remind you: She was the Florida secretary of state who proudly declared George W. Bush the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes in November 2000. Now she's a U.S. representative from Florida, and she's making waves again.\nIn an interview published in the journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention, Katherine Harris proclaimed, "If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin." All the good Jewish and Muslim citizens and people of other faith traditions can worship freely in this country, but the nation is doomed if they get into public office.\nScary, eh? It gets worse:\n• "If we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women," then "we're going to have a nation of secular laws. That's not what our Founding Fathers intended and that's certainly isn't what God intended." (A nation of secular laws sounds great to me! Did God sit down with the Founding Fathers to hammer out the plans?)\n• Harris claims the separation of church and state is a "lie we have been told." (Those Founding Fathers must've been really confused. They didn't intend to have secular laws, but they created a vicious lie to ensure we did.)\n• Separating religion and politics is "so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers." (I suppose it was God, not Harris, who eliminated over 55,000 eligible voters -- mainly Democrats -- from the voting rosters in Florida six months before the 2000 elections. Or maybe Harris and God were working together to ensure that the better Christian got into office -- the Christian who would hear God demand, "Go to war with Iraq!")\nHarris tried to smooth things over after the interview, but she stopped short of an apology. She claimed, "It breaks my heart" that people were offended -- probably about as much as it breaks my heart that this gaffe might cost her the election. \nApparently she only suggested that Christians were suitable for running the country because, according to Harris, her "comments were specifically directed toward a Christian group." Of course! That clears things up. Maybe the next time she addresses an all-white audience, she'll say that white people are the only ones equipped to govern the country. That's excusable if she's trying to craft a message suitable for her audience, right?\nRepublican and Democratic leaders have denounced her remarks. Yet her snafu glaringly reveals how deeply our national elections are influenced by religiously inspired division over issues like gay marriage, instead of more humane -- and, one could argue, more Christian -- issues like a failing education system, poverty and the fact that many Americans don't receive basic needs such as health care. Personally, I'd like to get back to government that looks more like a democracy instead of the theocracy Harris envisions.