Some of the best letters I get are from people who say they don’t want their name in the paper, but they just wanted to point out this or that. Today comes one from a 72-year-old local gentleman who, upon perusing last week’s bit about Huckabee and the Constitution, tells me that I’m actually treading way too lightly in terms of the Founders’ intentions; that the Constitution, in fact, “purely secular”:

Actually, the verbs in the very first sentence of our Constitution are a religious statement showing that the Founding Fathers created a government without religion. The sentence is, “We the people of the United States, in order to … (list of infinitive phrases) …, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” The Founding Fathers chose their words carefully. They certainly knew that “ordain” was something a Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Greek Orthodox bishop did to a layman to make him a clergyman. The competing governmental forms in those days were in societies run by the Pope, the Archbishop of Centerbury, and so on. Expressing complete nonconformity to the times, the Founding Fathers said that The Peoplee had the right to ordain their instrument of government. This is a deliberate religious statement of a totally  new ordeering of government, the Norvus Ordo Seclorum. (This is on our money as well as “In God we trust.”) …

The resulting Constitution is purely secular. It is unique in that it has the breadth and scope to be able to state that being religious is a personal right in parallel with the right to ordain and establish a government. Individuals who wish to change the Constitution to make it congruent to their personal set of tenets, such as “Bible-believing,” are wrong and evil. The People now constitute a great sea of diversity including Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, Mormons, Muslims, Agnostics, Athiests, Deists and all 27 symbols used on military headstones, as long as they bear allegiance to the Constitution.

The “evil” part will surely rankle, I don’t really agree with it - because I think that those who seek to enshrine their own faith in the Constitution truly believe they do so for purely moral purposes.

Then again, that is how the road to hell is paved, isn’t it?