The GOP's Lie du Jour: no God in Demo Platform

We should expect a shocking new revelation about those terrible Democrats pretty much daily from now through the election.

Yesterday's shocking revelation was that the word "God" doesn't appear in the Democratic Party platform. As proof that this went against the Founding Fathers' zeitgeist, they presented the Constitution--oops, no God there anywhere--so they presented the Declaration of Independence as our "founding document."

Oops again. The word "God" never appears there either. But what does appear is language that clearly refers to God--"endowed by our Creator."

So it appears that I'm splitting hairs to make a point, since the absence of the word "God" is actually irrelevant, since the reference to religious faith is there.

Well. So are the Republicans, because the Democratic Platform did include language talking about "faith" which clearly referred to God.

And so here again, for the umpty-zillionith time, the Republicans say something that is technically not a lie, but which is in fact a knowing, bald-faced lie--because the substance of the Republicans' charge is false.

If you care about substance, you will agree that this is yet another proof that the Republican Party has chosen lying as its main vehicle to advance its fortunes.

The Democrats are, as a whole, more secular than the Republicans, as a whole. Before the takeover of the Republican Party by erstwhile Southern White Democrats in the 1970s, there actually were many Republicans who were either nonreligious or whose religion wasn't the fervent Bible-thumping flavor of religion that now characterizes the Republican majority. Now they're either Independents or conservative Democrats.

But while Democrats are less fervent than today's Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats still profess to believe in God, and their party's platform reflected their faith--their calmer faith that doesn't say "You're going to Hell if you aren't not just a Christian but my kind of Christian."

In that sense many Republican Christians resemble Muslim Salafists, who say the same thing about hundreds of millions of their fellow Muslims that Fundamentalist Christians say of their fellow non-Fundamentalist Christians.

Also, this latest Republican lie also shows the Republicans' preference for symbols over reality. They never ask whether their own platform embodies Christ's instructions to us about what we should do with this life--in which case the Democratic Platform is far more Christlike than the Republicans' "I've got mine Jack you're on your own" platform.

But for the Republican Party, symbol trumps substance. Goes hand in hand with lying trumping actual policy discussion.