As all good, authentic progressives know, there only is one thing to do in the election year just dawning upon us. You vote for Bernie Sanders in your state's primary election and then, if (somehow) he is not nominated, you pack up your outrage and sit out the general election, so that someone like Ted Cruz gets elected and proceeds to Heighten The Contradictions. The reason for this is that There Would Be No Real Difference between President Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Tailgunner Ted Cruz and that, after four (or eight) years of the latter, the country will be ready to elect progressive heroes all over the country, and to put Unicorn J. Sparklepony into the White House.

Here with an opposing view is Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Speaking before a small crowd at Archbishop Rummel High School, Scalia delivered a short but provocative speech on religious freedom that saw the conservative Catholic take aim at those who confuse freedom of religion for freedom from it. The Constitution's First Amendment protects the free practice of religion and forbids the government from playing favorites among the various sects, Scalia said, but that doesn't mean the government can't favor religion over nonreligion. That was never the case historically, he said. It didn't become the law of the land until the 60s, Scalia said, when he said activist judges attempted to resolve the question of government support of religion by imposing their own abstract rule rather than simply observing common practice. If people want strict prohibition against government endorsement of religion, let them vote on it, he said. "Don't cram it down the throats of an American people that has always honored God on the pretext that the Constitution requires it." Citing a quotation attributed to former French President Charles de Gaulle, Scalia said "'God takes care of little children, drunkards and the United States of America.'" Scalia then added, "I think that's true. God has been very good to us. One of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor."

(Will there ever be an end to the very curious formulation by which something you don't like is always "crammed down your throat"? If he'd heard this repeated as often as it is, Dr. Freud would have gotten out of the business.)

"…an American people that has always honored God on the pretext that the Constitution requires it."

What in the name of John Wesley's choir robe is that supposed to mean? That the "American people" believed that a Constitution from which the name of any deity was deliberately omitted was believed by the American people to "require" that they worship one Deity or another? That we only "honored God" because we believed it was illegal not to? As a matter of fact, the First Amendment guarantees that government cannot "favor religion" over anything; Scalia himself ruled this way when he decided that the religious liberties of various Native American tribes could not be "favored" over the country's drug laws, despite the fact that, for example, peyote has been a sacrament in their religion for longer than bread and wine have been in Scalia's. Government is supposed to be scrupulously—one might even say "religiously"—neutral in all cases like these. Or, as Mr. Madison once put it:

The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and that it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.

Or not to exercise it, Mr. Madison not being so dim as to fail to anticipate that eventuality.

But, like I said, there's not a dime's bit of difference between a president who would not nominate another Scalia, and a president who would nominate three of them. So feel free to exercise your purity of conscience, while you still have a right to do so.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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