In a move that would shock only those who have been asleep for the last 50 years of American politics, the Republican party of Texas recently approved a plank for its platform which states that "the United States of America is a Christian nation."

While the Republican Party has not formally endorsed the platform, visible right-wing pundits wasted no time weighing in on the subject. Bill O'Reilly was, predictably, in favor of what he called a "largely symbolic" gesture to rebuff the secularist movement. Even better was the claim from "Hannity & Colmes," made by guest host Mike Gallagher, that "if a neighborhood had 82 percent of the population that was Italian or a town had 82 percent of the population that was Polish, we'd call those communities Italian or Polish towns. So why do liberals have such a knee-jerk reaction when anybody dares to suggest that with 82 percent of the population being Christian -- we are, in fact, a Christian nation?"

Obviously then we are also a White Nation, since over 3/4 of America is white. We are also a Fat Nation, and a Divorced Nation, since both categories boast a statistical majority of Americans. Oddly, there seems to be no movement toward endorsing such classifications, which leads to the puzzling conclusion that the Republicans might be acting somewhat...inconsistently. I know, I'm flabbergasted, too.

One op-ed in the Boston Globe objected to the plank, but did point out that "Secularist bigotry does exist. It can be found in policies that forbid any mention of faith in student graduation speeches in public schools, in campaigns to get Christmas decorations off public property, or in the recent successful push by the American Civil Liberties Union to remove a tiny cross from the Los Angeles County seal."

Yeah, damn that bigoted First Amendment! The Constitution always did pick on Christians. It wouldn't be so bad, except that stupid ACLU keeps trying to make sure that the Constitution is actually upheld, which ruins everybody's day. After all, if a violation of the Constitution is really little (like that cross in the state seal), or if it has something to do with the universally-celebrated holiday of Christmas, then it really should be allowed to slide.

People that support moves like this always try, as these Texans are doing in their plank, to claim that "our nation was founded on fundamental Judeo-Christian principles based on the Holy Bible." They do this by saying that even though the founders wrote the Constitution to keep religion out of government (and vice versa) the founders themselves were men of religion, and therefore our infant nation had good Christian parents. Never mind that this logic would also lead us to conclude that slavery is a founding principle of America, and would require us to overlook the tiny point that most of the leading framers of the Constitution were NOT CHRISTIAN. Little things like fact cannot stand before the awesome power of faith, after all.

At any rate, the Texan Republican Party has as much right to set down a definition of America as The Raving Atheist (feature article coming soon!) does, and thus it all cancels out in the end. These days fewer and fewer people are giving a fuck what some crazy Texan thinks, so I don't see this plank as much more than blog-fodder for those of us who get our yayas from picking on creatures as happless and mentally disadvantaged as the modern right-winger.