Last night, Alan Colmes hosted a debate between Cecil Bothwell, the North Carolina city councilman who is an atheist, and H. K. Edgerton, who is threatening to sue to get Bothwell thrown out of office for violating a provision in the state constitution prohibiting atheists from serving in public office.
Edgerton adimitted that prefers that people who serve in public in office believe in God because people who believe in God are more truthful while continutally insisting that he simply wants to see the law followed … and since the North Carolina constitution states that atheists cannot serve in public office, that is the position he is going to hold.
When Colmes asked him why, if he wants to follow the law, he is not following the supreme law of the land and the decision by the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 1961 that such religious tests were unconstitutional, Edgerton replied that didn’t really care what the Supreme Court ruled, insisting that North Carolina has not amended its constitution to abide by the Supreme Court ruling and so, until the state constitution is amended, this provision remains the law.
Colmes then asked Edgerton, who is African American, about his insistence on calling the Civil War the “war between the states” and a claim posted on his website asserting that during the Civil War “there were an estimated 50,000 blacks who served willingly as Confederate soldiers and almost four million other blacks who stayed on the farms, plantations and factories in the South of their own free will” … at which point the debate went entirely off the rails:
