Religion and Politics

A Dangerous Combination

On May 19th 2007, The Florida Family Policy Council (FFPC), a Focus on the Family affiliate, will hold its annual fundraiser.  This year’s attendees include Republican presidential candidates Sen. Brownback and Gov. Huckabee, along with many other prominent Florida politicians.  The Humanists of Florida Association (HFA) regards this blatant mixing of religion and politics to be a very dangerous combination.

America’s founders fought hard to ensure the separation of church and state, and yet now we have exactly the sort of co-mingling that they most feared.  Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

Humanists are dedicated to Democracy as an ethical form of government that allows for individual freedom while promoting personal responsibility. We promote freedom of belief and church-state separation as a way to protect our freedoms, and ensure that we as a society are able to find reasoned and compassionate solutions to human problems. HFA is pro-democracy and pro-human rights.  We view politicians supporting the work of one particularly radical sect of Christianity to be inappropriate, misguided, and a threat to our democracy.

HFA executive director, Heather Wellman, will be in Orlando and available for comment on May 19th.