Rick Wagner is obviously an attack dog for the far right locally and that is perfectly understandable where his ramblings are very favorably received by a sizable portion of the population.

His Dec. 26 mean-spirited, highly-exaggerated “observations,” coming the day after Christmas, a time of universal fellowship and good cheer, shows very poor judgment on his part, and regrettably, that of The Daily Sentinel, which approved the column’s publication.

There is no war against Christmas and people interested in the environment, no matter how enthusiastic, are not out to remove religion from people’s lives. There are many people who, however, do want religion — any religion — separate from government activities.

That apparently is what Wagner is ranting about and, no matter how he tries to claim otherwise, the founders of our nation very purposefully wanted people to have the right to worship as they choose, or not, but did not want to get it mixed up in government, which was meant to respect all religions and favor none.

The founders knew very clearly that government historically getting involved in religion in any way was an invitation for trouble. Our laws may include Christian ideals but those same ideals are held by many other religions, so our government is not “Christian” merely because of espousing those ideals and that most of the founders were personally Christians.

Wagner has a perfect right to preach his partisanship and bigotry every week, but coming the day after Christmas is over the top and a regrettable display of poor judgment. He could learn a lot from the letter from Mr. Kearsley, a fellow Republican, who doesn’t seem to feel the need to demonize those with different beliefs.

JOHN BORGEN
Grand Junction

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 11:53 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.