Bush has said that God wants him to be president. If God wanted Bush to be president, then God wanted all those poor people in Louisiana, and the thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians to die. Why? Was this God’s punishment to them for being black, poor, lower class, and Muslim?

This country was founded on the idea of freedom; for religion, culture, and personal values. On the statue of liberty, it asks other countries to ‘give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free’. It should state below, ‘as long as you’re not gay, and don’t mind staying poor while the upper class, wealthy, white men who run this country get richer and richer.’

One might wonder then, why Bush would want to be president of a country that bases its foundation on acceptance and tolerance? His motives might just be based on the fact that this country also happens to have the most powerful military and the largest disposable budget of any country in the world. I suppose it was also god’s plan for the most powerful country in the world to have the population most diverse in culture, ethnicity, and income.

The motivations behind the foundation of this country and the values it claims to preserve, are almost the direct opposite of everything Bush says and does. The first colonists came to America in search of religious freedom, (and let’s face it, prosperity). Have we come so far that we’ve traveled in a circle? Now we are inundated with religious rhetoric from our president, the man who runs the whole damn country. What in the world ever happened to the separation of church and state? When the country was just starting out, this separation served to keep state affairs out of the church. The church was the center of the community, and the state was just being founded.

Now we are a nation of united states, and do not need any religious overtones to our laws. The system of laws in this country has been finely tuned and adjusted for over 200 years now, by men and women who have studied it all their lives. There is no justification for basing laws around a book which only a percentage of the population base their lives. In that case, why on earth did people bother leaving Europe to begin with?

Religion is something that can be inspiring, spiritual, uplifting, and hopeful. There is one factor that exists among all religions, and that is faith. Nothing in the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran can ever be substantiated by physical evidence. People believe things because they have faith in their religion, whatever it may be.

The law however, is based on truth. It relies on evidence, skill of argument, and the hearts and minds of human beings. It is not always perfect, but nothing is. Decisions that affect every citizen of this country cannot come from reasoning based on faith. To make those decisions, you just need to look around. Look at the streets, the schools, the hospitals, the prisons, the shelters. These people don’t need your faith, they need your intelligence and forethought to make changes to the country that will enable them to improve their situations. I fear the meaning of words like ‘intelligence’ and ‘forethought’ are lost on men like Bush.

E-mail Devon: [email protected]