Earlier this week, Rick Santorum warned on the Family Research Council’s radio program that not allowing Christian business owners to discriminate against gay customers in the name of “religious liberty” was essentially establishing a new secular theocracy in America.
This has obviously become Santorum’s new line of attack, because he used it again when he recently sat down for a short interview with Randy Robison, son of Religious Right televangelist James Robison.
Santorum said that the courts and liberal activists have flipped Thomas Jefferson’s famous “separation of church and state” on its head so that now Christians are being prohibited from exercising their faith in the public square.
“The separation now is people of faith can’t tell the government what to do,” he said. “In other words, we can’t bring our faith claims into the public square to live them out fully. And that is an interesting thing because what people say now is ‘anywhere the government is, faith can’t be.’ Well, where isn’t the government?”
“I think you’re also starting to see a violation of the Establishment Clause,” Santorum continued, “because what we’re seeing now is an establishment not of a traditional church that you and I [know], a Bible-based church, but a liberal orthodoxy that says you have to believe these things or else you’re going to run afoul of the federal government”:
