A reminder of why I am not a liberal

Thanks to Josh Keller over at How Sleep the Brave for this reminder, spoken by an old friend....

"Anytime God's mentioned by anybody in a political realm, who panics? The left! Why are they so afraid of God? Why? Those of you who believe in God, what's the basis? Why be so fearful of God you've got to take it out of your Founding Documents; you got to take it out of the Pledge of Allegiance; you can't let it be uttered by elected officials. Why? There has to be a reason for the fear, and I think when you look at libs who think only of themselves, God threatens them. God is a competitor to them. Faith in something larger than government, faith in something larger than ourselves, is competitive, is competition to the left. They don't like competition. They stamp it out. They wipe it out. It's called political correctness. It's called not letting this idiot Harvard professor say what he thinks. They have to shut him up and ruin his career, even if he's one of them. They can't handle the competition! They can't handle something different and they can't handle change and they can't handle something larger than themselves, and so faith in God is a competition they can't win, so they besmirch it. They discredit it. They mock it, and make fun of it, and the people who have such faith, and if you doubt this, just look at the last presidential campaign and what it was based on, and look at the election aftermath when the left thinks that it was values and morality that beat them. Look at the abject panic that they're in, because they know they can't compete with it. They can only stifle it and discredit it, and they have failed to do so. Playing god is precisely what liberalism is all about. I may be overstating it a bit, but liberalism's biggest challenge today is religious faith, faith in something other than them and big government. That's the stumbling block they have. That's the largest obstacle in front of their recovery. They have people who will not survive if they make a practice of citing faith in God. The left doesn't want to hear this! The loony left in Europe, the socialist left, doesn't want to hear about God. They don't want to hear about religion. It's too threatening. It's too frightening, and all it represents in a basic human sense is the understanding that there's something larger than ourselves, and that's essentially what the left cannot deal with, because they are larger than the rest of us. They are the elites. They are the ones that are smart. They're the ones that run the government. They'll protect us. They'll make sure we'll do the right things because we're too stupid to do it ourselves. When we know that there are forces, however we define them, greater than ourselves, and seeking to use that faith to improve ourselves. When the left sees that, they are in abject fear! Because it means the gig is up. It means that more and more people are not going to look at Ted Kennedy as their salvation, or Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Barbara Boxer or any other leftist elitists you want to mention. They're going to look to things larger than themselves and their government, and this is, I think, the central reason that George W. Bush is so feared. The fear manifests itself in ridicule and insulting laughter and mockery, but make no mistake, folks: It is real, quake-in-their-boots, fear. Read the Declaration of Independence. All of its lofty talk about natural rights, God, equality and liberty? No wonder the left has school teachers that are trying to get that document banned from being taught in Cupertino, California! You want to read a lofty document? You want to hear about an ambitious vision of the future? Read the damned Declaration of Independence. Let's start making fun of that and then let's say, "Oh, no, that's not possible!" Go back to the 1700s and tell the people that wrote that, "Oh, you're silly. We can't do that. That's not possible. What do you mean? Only 37% of the people are in favor of this." Yeah, that's something lofty, and then the Constitution. Oh, oh, oh! Let's look at that. "That will never work, that will never hold up."