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Permalink Reply by Charles Cusumano on January 21, 2009 at 9:31am

yes, yes, yes, all that. BUT it really wasn‘t out of place. We were included in the group of “belivers”. We are believers too. We believe that there is no god, so it all fit. Obama HAD to say GBA at the end. Atheist leanings or not, he is pandering to the majority of citizens who do have a sooper Power belief. I’d be curious to know how far back that oath goes. Remember, Jefferson was an agnostic (his bible was as thick as my rural newspaper after he pruned it of crap) and I’ll be he didn’t write it.

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Permalink Reply by George Kane on January 21, 2009 at 9:52am

To which oath are you referring? If you mean "God bless us and God bless the United States of America," I don't know. It sounds very LBJ. But if you meaan the Inauural oath with "so help me God" appended, the first record of it is by Chester Allen Arthur in 1881. It has been used every time since 1933.

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Permalink Reply by Charles Cusumano on January 21, 2009 at 10:00am

Yes, I was referring to the regular Oath that for some reason John Roberts modified on the fly. Was that a chance to let the Democratic President know that the highest court in the land was staffed with Bush shills and they were in control? Pardon the conspiracy theory paranoia. :-)

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Permalink Reply by George Kane on January 21, 2009 at 10:28am

I just assumed he was drunk. He also added "I, Barack Hussein Obama" instead of "I do solemnly swear (or affirm)...." Of course he misplaced "faithfully."

Since the presidential oath is specified in the Constitution, amending it, as Roberts did, is a constitutional amendment. That requires approval by Congress and the states. Perhaps his message is that he does not plan to permit the Constitution to constrain him.

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Permalink Reply by mthoreau on January 21, 2009 at 11:40am

Since the presidential oath is specified in the Constitution, amending it, as Roberts did, is a constitutional amendment. That requires approval by Congress and the states. Perhaps his message is that he does not plan to permit the Constitution to constrain him.

HA! Perhaps!

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Permalink Reply by Stephanie on January 21, 2009 at 6:07pm

Obama received a lot of letters from secular organizations prior to the inauguration. He is well aware of our dismay at how the religious right has been running ram shod the past 8 years. His mom was secular. I truly believe he feels we are all equal no matter what we believe.

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Permalink Reply by Charles Cusumano on January 22, 2009 at 8:16am

By now you have heard that they did it again and got it right this time. They redidt it because some thought that it wasn’t the oath he was supposed to take and there might be a challenge. All that is moot now but what irks me is that the CHIEF JUSTICE fucked up the oath. Another example of the imbicils Bush appointed to the court. Now that he’s gone, It makes me think of how my cat, when his litter box got full, would go find hiding placed to poop only to be discovered later. I’ll bet that there is lots o’ poop waiting to be cleaned up in the erstwhile Bush Monarchy.

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Permalink Reply by George Kane on January 22, 2009 at 11:14am

No, they did not get it right. They ammended the Constitution by adding "so help me God" to the end of the oath. It is bad enough that they did it the first time, but an outrageous insult to everyone who supports the separation of church and state when they did it in the retake which they held to correct a completely insignificant word resequencing because it diverged from that same Constitution.

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Permalink Reply by Charles Cusumano on January 22, 2009 at 12:03pm

true enough

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Permalink Reply by BADWOLF on January 23, 2009 at 6:58am

kane ombama being sworn in isnt the first time he meantion non-believers he mention it in a speech in a church

see link to video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdB1_KFOhnU

so it is possiable when he meantioned non believers after being sworn in it my not of been thrown in but we never know for sure because even if we could as ombama he could like/ not remember or just have a false memory (if you dont believe false memories are true look it up yourself there are quiet a few papers and articles on the topic by alot of respectable sources including scientific america)

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Permalink Reply by George Kane on January 23, 2009 at 10:03am

Obama says all the right things about separation of church and state in this brief excerpt. It appears all over the web to show that Obama is a secularist. It has been mailed to me by several atheists, to prove that Obama is a champion against religion in government whom we should embrace. It is even linked from the IHEU website. But no one ever talks about the rest of that speech, his Keynote Address to the 2006 Call to Renewal's Building a Covenant for a New America conference.

There Obama speaks about the great religiosity of the American people, about his own religious center and the deep impact of his religious experience. He talks about how liberals need to embrace religious language, and how they fail to address the moral underpinnings of social issues when they avoid it. He assures the religious conference that their spiritual concerns have an important role in political life.

But why do Obama-backing secularists always point to this same, old clip? That speech was made in 2006, before he began his presidential campaign. I think that his position on church state separation was completely superseded by his Zanesville, Ohio speech. There he announced that he wants to increase funding for the faith-based initiative, strengthen religion through partnerships with government, and make religion central to creating the national agenda.

Obama has some notions of church-state separation, but he really has no commitment to stopping government endorsement of religion. He showed at the inauguration that it is just not his value.

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