“You can’t separate church from state…. People would say, you know, when you’re voting on issues, how do you separate your faith from the way you vote? Faith is part of who you are.”

This is dumb. We can put more words to it, but at the core of it this is not an argument, it is just vocalized stupidity.

The agony-inducing part of this statement, coming immediately after the immediate truthiness-based homage to Jefferson, is that this dull-minded, rote, nasty conflation of church with faith is exactly the distinction that guided much of what Jefferson and like-minded thinkers were getting at, and 200 years later it zooms over the current majority whip's head like a runaway rocket sled. No, the separation of church and state does not and has never meant abandoning "faith" in the voting booth. On the contrary, its very purpose is to ensure citizens can freely express the tenets of their own faith in the voting booth, even if the details of their faith differ from those publicly declared by anti-intellectual political blowhards in ostentatiously religious events.

That is the point. That is the whole point. But this is exactly the distinction that "religious" conservatives like Steve Scalise will never, ever get. The whole point of religious expression is, for them, a form of social signaling; the professed beliefs and morals of their own religion are of less importance than the encompassing public demand that their religion be considered the right one, and the religions practiced by the rest of their countrymen the wrong ones; belief in God is not so much a matter of faith or introspection as it is a sports franchise. It has banners, and iconography, and a history behind it; you root for the one your parents told you to root for, and your beliefs in the virginity of so-and-so or the transubstantiation of such-and-such are the equivalent of the designated hitter rule: you may not fully understand the details or the alternatives, but you know anyone who disagrees is the devil himself.

Separating church and state is not only “possible,” it is a foundational premise of our very notion of "liberty." The government is ordered to abide whatever religious beliefs the citizenry comes up with, so long as it does no harm to others; the government is ordered to stay out of theological squabbles rather than put its heavy thumb on the scale to endorse one side of a religious argument while suppressing the others. If citizens want to bring their own personal god into the voting booth with them, no law will object and no official may act to bar those doors; it takes a conspiratorial dullard to suppose a plot there to clip the faithful's wings.

What would Steve Scalise have, instead of the current system? Which religious tenets are worth enshrining, and which are not? That is key. The man's punishment should be that he be required to explain himself, and how he would alter the nation's current laws. Watching him humiliate himself in the first three minutes of that attempt would be a decent reward for those of us obliged to listen to him. But I do not believe, for a moment, that Scalise could offer those details. He does not care. He has not considered it. He knows the church versus state debate only in pamphlet form; he offers it up here as cheap, empty signal to a base who knows no more than him about the subject but which is forever twitching about their religion being oppressed by virtue of having to abide the others.

Does Steve Scalise mean that religions that do not seek to oppress LGBT Americans should be considered equal to those that do? He does not. Does he mean to say that admonitions against abortion should be left as edicts of some religions, but not codified into law in opposition to the others? He does not. He means what all the others mean: his religion should be written into the laws, and the others declared illegitimate. He is not smart enough to, at any point, have expanded his notions of religious "freedom" beyond that base tribalism. He is a buffoon. Scalise spent exactly as much time on his faux-historical, faux-theological effort as he had to, meaning he scribbled together a few words based on what he thought he remembered from a history quiz, that one time, but he still expects the rest of the nation to treat him as a serious voice spouting serious things.

We don't have to. We aren't obliged to respect the man; we aren't obliged to nod our heads as he makes a mess of whatever bits of our history he wants to make a mess of. We don't have to present Thomas Jefferson's footnoted works; we don't have to cite relevant works of philosophy or theology in yet another attempt to rebut the man's bumbling notions of voting-booth oppression. He doesn't deserve that much effort on our parts. Rolling our eyes at the man is sufficient.