So you know that whole separation of church and state this nation was supposedly founded on? Well, Republican presidential candidate John Kasich feels differently. In fact, he’d like to form a government agency to push Judeo-Christian values to China, Russia, Iran and the Middle East. ‘Cuase that’s a good use of government time, energy, and funding:
“We need to beam messages around the world” about the freedoms Americans enjoy, Kasich said in an interview with NBC News Tuesday. “It means freedom, it means opportunity, it means respect for women, it means freedom to gather, it means so many things.” He defended creating a new government agency at a time when fellow Republican presidential candidates discuss eliminating government agencies to making the government smaller. “There’s nobody who’s spent more time shrinking government and cutting budgets than I have.”
Team Blackness also discussed Ben Carson’s questionable grasp of foreign policy and more Republicans being the worst when it comes to refugees.
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Amir Khalid
I guess none of Kasich’s advisers dared tell him his proposal was obviously unconstitutional. Not that I blame them. The truth would have set them free — from their job, that is.
scav
@Amir Khalid: Kim Davis, Patron Saint of Christianity Over Constitution, Over Mere Laws, has blessed the endeavor and shown the way.
ETA: Oh yeah, see also the parade of governors putting up No Room for Toddlers in danger posters.
MomSense
I hope it’s the Department of the 8lb 6oz baby Jesus. Christmas Jesus is my favorite.
I can’t take these Republican candidates seriously.
Roger Moore
@MomSense:
If it’s any consolation, nobody else seems to be taking Kasich very seriously, least of all the Republican voters.
scav
@MomSense: Especially since the face of any actual baby Jesus is going to look a lot more exactly like the face of all those toddlers they’re pushing out the borders than the fair-haired snowflakes dancing about their stuffed christmas stockings.
Bob Munck
Being head of that agency will be known as The Missionary Position.
JCJ
@Bob Munck:
That might attract quite a few candidates.
Emma
Good luck with “Christianizing” Russia:
c. 50–60 St. Andrew allegedly does mission work in Ukraine and, standing on the future site of Kiev, predicts that a great Christian city will one day exist there
860–65 With Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Christian missions to the Slavic nations begin in earnest; Cyril establishes Cyrillic alphabet that is still used by Eastern Slavs today
c. 864 Under the auspices of Rus’ Prince Askold and Patriarch Photius, the first baptism in Rus’-Ukraine
869 Eighth Ecumenical Council (in Constantinople)
955 Princess Olga, the queen of Kievan Rus’, is baptized at Constantinople
988–991 Mass baptism takes places at Kiev, Grand Prince Vladimir makes Orthodox Christianity the national religion of Rus’—which it remained until 1917.
David Koch
I believe it was a Jewish carpenter who once said:
MomSense
@Bob Munck:
HA!
Felanius Kootea
The only good Sharia is the Christian kind, of course. Will the agency also feed the poor and tell rich people about camels, needle eyes and heaven?
Mike J
Foreign policy? He doesn’t even know what the US looks like.
Mike in NC
Kasich might pull a Jindalesque disappearing act by the end of this month.
mikefromArlington
Was thinking…both the Lebanon attacks nor the Boko Haram attacks will even get a tenth the news reports as will the France attacks and loads of blogs will give out to the press for not covering the other two attacks. I wouldn’t be surprised if I went to those blogs that over time I’d get something close to that same 10% as well
Ken
@Emma: So you’re saying Russian is badly in need of the Prosperity Gospel, Traditional Values education, and a Promise Keepers chapter?
Gin & Tonic
@Emma: I have been in St. Sophia’s (Kiev), portions of which date to the 11th Century. It gives you a different perspective on history than Kasich will get in Ohio, where the oldest church was built about 800 years later.
Emma
@Gin & Tonic: It’s on my bucket list. As are the Yuriev and Ivanovsky monasteries. And this pisher thinks he can teach them anything about Christianity.
A guy
If u really want to destroy the separation let all the Muslims in and then sit back to watch
Iowa Old Lady
I don’t even know what to say about all this stuff. It just seems obviously crazy to me, and yet other people act as if it’s sane and sensible.
Felanius Kootea
@A guy: The US only ever offered to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees, with each refugee going through FBI and other checks – a process that often takes years. Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq have taken in 3 million Syrian refugees with little or no vetting because of the desperation of the refugees’ situation. No one is thanking them or worrying about their countries being destabilized because I guess they don’t matter. All that matters is that Republican governors half a world away don’t want Syrians. Got it.
David Koch
@Felanius Kootea: It’s like the ebola panic. there were 3 people out of 320,000,000 million who had it, yet a national freakout ensued.
Nate Dawg
Serious question: At what point does the media’s pushing of Daesh propaganda, glorification of its killers as “masterminds”, and stirring up sympathy for brutal war all to get clicks and sell advertising–at what point does the media become a war profiteer?
Timurid
Deus lo vult!
Sicilian Dish
If our ‘Christian’ values solved any of our real world problems such as homelessness, persistent systemic poverty, racism, misogyny, war-mongering, and climate change; our values might be worth sharing. However, we are now just one the problem states other countries have to contend with, blundering American ‘leadership’ created the morass in the middle east. The rest of the world must be looking at the GOP and wondering if we are crazy enough to elect another idiot and which country that idiot would choose to invade.
Matt McIrvin
@Nate Dawg: I think the point was sometime around January 1991.
azlib
Wow! And Kasich is supposedly the rational one on team Red.
tones
@scav:
Exactly, Jesus would have looked more like Osama Bin Laden than Kid Rock.
[being from the middle east and all]
terben
Whenever I read the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian values’ anywhere, I think to myself ‘What have these fuckers stolen from the rest of humanity now?’