Ok OK I’m I little quirky. I’m focussing on just one little phrase. There will be endless talk about the debate, and I’ll check all that out later. So I’m not going to rehearse the whole thing, but instead focus on one little thing that has always bothered me and bothers me more now.

The phrase Bush used at least twice, the "armies of compassion," is an almost total cognitive dissonance for me. Armies and compassion invoke very different associations. Armies are about domination, military control, necessary (and often unnecessary) killing and destruction. Compassion is about fellow-feeling, about awareness and sympathy for suffering. Literally, it means to "suffer with" another, to commiserate, to feel sorrow provoked by understanding of the distress of another. It means warmheartedness, tenderness, forgiveness, pity, brotherhood and sisterhood. It means understanding, insight, and acceptance of reality combined with a desire to lessen suffering.

Bush has been using militant Christian language since before he ran for President. Bush denies any church-state impropriety in doling out billions of tax dollars to religious organizations for charitable activities; he says he is just ending the welfare state’s "history of discrimination against faith-based groups." But take a look at the histories of some of the groups receiving funding, see who is left off the funding list, and see where we make cuts. This government-funded religious mission is in direct violation of our Constitution – which says that the government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

It is not American to use the government in the service of religion, although it has been popular over the world and throughout history. Our country was founded with a commitment to individual freedom. Religion is a personal choice – it is against our historical principles to force anyone to obey the dictates of any religion. This is one of our primary definitions of freedom in this country, and worth fighting for. I grew up in a minority religion, and left that religion. I have been self-righteous and sure, and I have been full of doubt. I believe that religion is a life journey, and that no-one in this country has the right to force anyone else to believe or not believe any dictate of doctrine, or to make material needs dependent on following man-made rules parading as ultimate authority. We define criminal behavior in terms of our laws, not the interpretations of any particular sect.

For some, the choice is between science and religion, but I believe that science and religion should fundamentally inform one another. Each has much to learn. We are under attack by religious fundamentalists that we call terrorists, while placing religious fundamentalists of another kind in power. I am not accusing America Christians of being terrorists here – of course not – but we should be getting less extremeist and more inter-cooperative rather than mirroring the extremeism that we can all see is so destructive in other countries.

Yet our science is self-righteous as well. There should be an expansion of dialogue. It disturbs me that this process of communication and dialogue, that finds common ground and brings ethical concerns to the table for public debate has been shut down by powers in this country who seem to have no internal contradiction or conscience about invoking religion and appeals to faith to advance bloodthirsty greedy and corrupt sets of agendas that are incredibly contrary to basic religious understandings of almost all faiths. Please, please take a look at the results of withdrawing from treaties that our own government took decades to help craft, the results (including more abortions, more late abortions) that result in limiting family planning and counselling of all options – our policies on these matters affect lives all over the world. That half of America is still hoodwinked by this propaganda machine has become a matter of personal horror for me. Good people, kind people, have been sucked in by it.

Republicans have obtained church rosters to identify likely supporters and voters. Today news broke that one of the companies the Bush campaign hired to get out the vote has been caught in Nevada throwing away democratic registrations, even withholding the registration receipt from the unlike-minded. There may or may not be an investigation.

President Bush has gone around Congress to spread his faith-based initiative throughout the federal government. We are "slouching toward theocracy," if not exactly Bethlehem. Hey, who’s going to round up the guy in the blue turban who’s supposed to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey? Will it be Bin Laden? Listen, I grew up in a theocracy. Not a good idea.

The White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI)lost its director John DiIulio, who resigned after only six months, the subject of an Esquire magazine interview highly critical of the administration. The Washington Post reported that top administration officials had tried to solicit support from the Salvation Army by offering a firm commitment that any legislation would allow religious organizations to sidestep state and local anti-discrimination measures barring discriminatory hiring practices on the basis of sexual orientation.

Fools! He is moving the expense of and responsibility toward the poor to the financial resources of your church! Can your church afford to take that on? Or is this a temporary move until it can either be privatized or quietly made into a eugenics program?

Just incidentally, Brother Governor Jeb Bush presided over the opening of the nation’s first full-fledged faith-based prison last Christmas – the Lawtey Correctional Institute.

At least four operatives of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church are on the federal payroll or getting government grants through President George W. Bush’s "Healthy Marriage Initiative" and other "faith-based" programs. Bush has also appointed a top official for Moon in Washington to head AmeriCorps VISTA. Did you know that earier this year, a bipartisan group of congressional members attended a coronation event for Moon in the Dirksen Senate Office Building?

If your daughter or girlfriend or sister got pregnant, wouldn’t you want her to get counselling on all the possibilities? Or would you rather she pretend that she’s not pregnant at all until it is too late, or split off from herself and abandon the baby, or attempt a home abortion? If your wife or sister or friend or daughter was going to have a baby born into poverty, into serious disability and pain, out of incest and rape – wouldn’t you want the decision to be hers, using a safe procedure early in pregnancy, before there is any brain activity at all? When someone decides to go forward with a Down’s Syndrome baby, wouldn’t you want her to have made that decision with all the information in hand? I believe that the government is not qualified to make these decisions for other people, and the countdown timing of a pregnancy clock also means that information and decisions must come quickly. The controversy on this issue indicates that it needs to be a matter of choice for the person who will be most affected by the outcome. That’s the law in this country. And if all women had healthcare and counselling at the beginning, I don’t believe that the decision would linger past the earliest days of pregancy, when oftentimes the woman’s own body may terminate the pregnancy.

We are divided in this country on a lot of religious issues – but this whole method of addressing faith – the use of religion as a force of power – is historically and currently destructive to our country.

The new neo-cons resist solutions for loving childcare and work practices conducive to families, put heavy arms back on the street, and their solution is to send young evangelists with pamphlets to combat HIV, drugs, and crime. Right. Listen, as someone who was for a time a young evangelist, let me tell you – bad move. Truth is the remedy. They’ve let ideology – whether you agree with it or not – overrun good sense for us all. It’s like the moment when the language of liberation turned into authoritarianism of language on the left – a bad moment that helped fuel resentment. It’s just better when we have the freedom and the opportunity to get conflicting beliefs get out there – when we discuss and debate, when we find common ground and can agree on compromise solutions that honor the rights and freedoms of all involved while standing for justice.

No matter what your faith, the institutions getting government money should at least be subject to oversight. They still need fire extinguishers. We still want predators to be kept from our children. Private christian organizations simply cannot take on the drug problem and the crime problem and the poverty problem – their efforts are very very welcome when present, but are only supplemental to the responsibilities of our government to take care of the least among us. That is a value of our government that comes from a religious principle common to the judgment of all the "religions of the book." It is one of the ways that we judge whether a government is good for its people.

I don’t see much of the "christian soldiers" here – I suppose they are marching onward and all someplace around here. Homeless people I have known don’t get much help – most of the time, they can’t understand how to get help even if it’s there. They are certainly not going to get a pleasant reception if they walk through the door in many churches here. No, they hang out under bridges, and look for marks like me, I suppose. I give what I can – which isn’t much, believe me – not really knowing if I’m helping or adding to the problem, and knowing that our psychiatric hospitals aren’t really an option for them anymore, and they have problems at the few shelters left, and that no-one wants them around, but there’s nowhere to go. There are all sorts of reasons for poverty and/or homelessness – most of them are pretty much ignored my this administration.

The "armies of compassion" idea distracts Americans from the issue of providing adequate resources to address the real problem of poverty in this extremely wealthy country. That’s bad for all of us, and not only to those who have to submit to religious coercion to receive food, shelter, job training, or drug treatment.

In an average religious community of about 300 people, I think there are usually less than five truly inspiring people (they aren’t the ones you think at first), and usually a little more than five that are toxic and dangerous – and most of the rest of the people are mixed – human, with strengths and weaknesses, blind spots and real virtues. We should be taking advantage of the strengths of our people, not turning them against one another. We are forming all sots of partnerships without governmental mandates, but this task has been disrupted by the new need for religious institutions, secular nonprofit charities and public agencies to fight against one another for a smaller and smaller piece of pie of human services federal funding.

Anyway, who can really think of themself as a "soldier of compassion"? It just doesn’t work that way. Keep those "armies of compassion" away from me – they know not what they do. Get the moneychangers out of the temple, and stop politicizing God.

God does not belong to neo-cons, and greed and domination are not religious values.