A Political Analogy
The History of Separation of Church and State in Modern America
You ever have roaches?
When I was living in Denver, we had one apartment with a weird infestation. The apartments on either side of us had a parade of short term tenants. Every time someone would move out, the landlord would bug bomb the vacant apartment. This would start a migration of roaches through our apartment as they ran away from the poison.
They would be everywhere for a few days, and we’d do what we could to kill them, then they would disappear until someone moved out. We kept a clean place, with the exception of a long power struggle in the kitchen while Joey waited for me to do the dishes, and I waited for him to so the same. A stalemate until a migration started. When the bugs came through, everything got cleaned, new poisons were laid out, etc.
Every few weeks - roaches.
A couple of days later, no roaches and the dishes got done.
So, a few hundred years ago, a bunch of people ran away from England because it wasn’t religious enough. They wanted a place, when you think about it, where they could light ladies on fire, and Europe was on a drowning ladies kind of kick. Bucking societal norms, these religious assclown ran away to be even bigger assholes where society wasn’t watching how fucking weird they got.
Most of them died. Nature’s roach poison.
Flash forward a few years and another gang of refugees have landed on the amber waves and decided to form a little club. They invited all the other kids in the neighborhood to join them, and they sent a letter to the school bully asking to be left alone.
The school bully responded by kicking the shit out of the kids in the gang. The gang responded by gathering as a group and getting Adam Baldwin (the French) to protect them at recess.
After Adam Baldwin helped us kick the bully’s ass, the gang wrote another letter, this one for all the other kids in the gang to vote on. It was a list of rules you needed to adhere to to stay in the club. The first rule was pretty important. The first rule was pretty important, that’s why it was first:
“In the first instance, the Establishment Clause states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. In the strictest reading, the Establishment Clause proscribes any adoption of an official religion by the federal government. The second clause of the First Amendment that deals with religion immediately follows the Establishment Clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof." Where the first clause prohibits Congress from adopting any particular religion, the second clause prohibits Congress from interfering with an individual's exercise of religion. This second clause is called the Free Exercise Clause. The Free Exercise Clause protects an individual's right not only to believe what he or she would like but also to practice it. The clause protects individuals from laws that would expressly inhibit them from engaging in religious practices.” - LII
The old gang knew what problems religion could cause, especially if one religion gained more ground than the others.
Remember the first group? The ones that ran away from Europe because their religion wasn’t violent, misogynistic, loopy, crazy pants weird enough for them? They’re back.
I’ll mix a metaphor for you … ideas don’t die, even bad ones. The “force everyone to do it like I do it OR ELSE” gang unfortunately wrote their poison down and modern evangelicals found it and fucking LOVE IT!
BOOM! The roaches are back. These disgusting little fuckers are crawling over everything, leaving their diseased dropping all over the place, and causing lots of problems. It’s all part of their ironic evolutionary process.
Let me now strain the metaphor.
What needs to happen is what will never happen. There is enough political pressure in America to get the evangelicals to go back to their place. You can’t get rid of all of them, you can just make them relocate a little bit. Get them hidden, get them back in the dark where they belong.
Basically, you need to bug bomb all three apartments at the same time, and instead, we’ve broken into smaller groups that will only poison one apartment at a time, and, thus, we have a cockroach infestation that will never go away.
The numbers are there, the desire is there, but the roaches have gerrymandered the building which makes everyone angry, but also makes them lack the collective will to fix the fucking problem, if not forever, for at least a couple hundred years.
It doesn’t help that the Supreme Court just absolved the roaches and put them above the law … of roach spray …
I’ve lost the plot along the way.
Basically, it’s time to stand up, speak loudly, and vote like your life depends on it - no matter how fucking old he is - because it does. As bad as Project 2025 is, it was written by Christian zealots, and is therefore full of roaches - hidden, diseased, and bent on domination.
