Weak Hastert

There is a weakness in the chatter we hear dropping from the mouths of men like Representative Dennis Hastert and Senator Frist.
A weakness that reaches back through the centuries to our earliest settlers and echoes a misconception in religion that has infected their ability to make competent decisions and has led to a lockjaw form of representative government that Bush is trying to take for everything its worth.
In the early days of American life the settlers were a strict and severe bunch of folks. In some cases they went too far. The burning of the witches in Salem and throughout New England is a case in point. The flailing and dismemberment of ‘sinners’ in the southeast is another.
Senator Frist’s wild eyed opposition and his ill considered remarks hearken back to an early law in New England that ‘…whoso affirms works, not faith, to be the mode of salvation; or opposes infant baptism; or purposefully leaves the churches when infants are about to be baptized; shall suffer banishment: and that whoso denies any infallibility of the Bible, shall, for the first offence, “be openly and severely whipped by the executioner,” and for the second, may be put to death.’
Idolatry is the worship of any stone idol or graven image – and Frist has taken for his idol the words of our laws and with them he wishes to cast spells upon the rest of us. His manner is so out of date it looks new. It is not.