A Stitch in Haste

...but you are not entitled to your own Jefferson:

Newdow's argument, despite the 9th Circuit's previous acceptance, is logically flawed. It is based on a phrase — separation of church and state — that appears nowhere in the Constitution and whose meaning is a far cry from "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It ignores that God — the Creator and source of our inalienable rights — is in the Declaration of Independence. And it ignores a vast array of our founders' words and actions, during the Revolutionary period and in governing under the Constitution, that reveal they did not share Newdow's objections.

Of course, this dim-bulb theocrat ignores the pesky fact that the Declaration of Independence is not a binding legal document in the constitutional or statutory sense, and neither does "endowed by their Creator" in any way dictate or even hint that a Christian or even a vaguely religious government is either mandatory or even wise.

More:

Jefferson quoted the Establishment Clause immediately before writing "thus building a wall of separation between Church & State." Since it restricted only Congress and not any religious group, Jefferson's wall was necessarily a "one way" wall. It kept Congress from intruding into religious matters but did nothing to prohibit religion's influence on government or the public.

What kind of intellectual gobbledygook is a "one-way wall"? Congress must stay secular — unless theocrats take it over? "We promise never to do X — until we vote to do X?" The First Amendment exists not to protect the religious minority but rather to protect the religious majority — from a majoritarian legislature?

Welcome to faith-based constitutional interpretation (not to mention faith-based logic). Simultaneously scary and laughable.

Here, by contrast, is the reality-based version:

Thomas Jefferson was a thoroughgoing skeptic who valued reason above faith. He subjected every religious tradition, including his own, to careful scrutiny. He had no patience for talk of miracles, revelation, and resurrection. Like Franklin, Jefferson admired Jesus as a moral philosopher, but insisted that Jesus' teachings had been distorted beyond all recognition by a succession of "corruptors," such as Paul, Augustine, and Calvin. He regarded such doctrines as predestination, trinitarianism, and original sin as "nonsense," "abracadabra" and "a deliria of crazy imaginations." He referred to Christianity as "our peculiar superstition" and maintained that "ridicule" was the only rational response to the "unintelligible propositions" of traditional Christianity.

If it is possible to "defame history," then there are few more egregious examples than suggesting that Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney are the heirs to Thomas Jefferson's intellectual or political legacy.

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Meanwhile:

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has introduced a resolution (H.Res. 847) saying, and I am not making this up, that Christmas and Christians are important.

Who would dare suggest that Thomas Jefferson would be proud of this?