"Don - push for a change in your constitution...a Church of the U.S.A. would be a good move...also look at the gun laws and weather a good leader should have to go simply because he/she has served two terms."

David, I do believe that it would be a good idea to re-evaluate the actual meaning of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. And a re-examination of the two-term rule might also be in order. As I recall, this law was pushed for by disgruntled conservatives who were upset over the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt kept getting reelected (having instituted many of the laws and regulations that helped the country get out of the Depression of the 1930s—and which the Bush administration refused or neglected to enforce, which is why the economy is currently in a state of chaos—and because the voters wanted to return him to office), and was serving his fourth term when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

But a "Church or the U.S.A.?" An official state church?

Considering the number of religious denominations in this country that would like very much to be the State Church, which would you recommend? Catholic? Lutheran? Episcopalian? Methodist? Presbyterian? Baptist (and if so, which denomination, the more liberal ones or those favored by the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference)? Assembly of God (Sarah Palin's Pentecostal denomination)? Mormon? The Church of the Golden Globes?

How about Judaism. Okay, which? Orthodox? Reformed? Or would you prefer Jews for Jesus?

Muslim, perhaps. Sunni? Shi-ite?

Druidism. . . .

Perhaps you have forgotten (from your Humanities course, which I presume included History) that many of the first immigrants to the American colonies fled here to escape the kind of religious persecution that State Religions tend to promulgate. And that this was the reason for the First Amendment: to safeguard the right to Freedom of Religion (which some people tend to forget also means freedom from religion).

And that to make it stick, we had to beat the crap out of the English and send them packing back home.

Fortunately, our two countries have let bygones remain bygones, and all is tranquil now.

But the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, many countries agree, is a good model for enacting laws for the protection of Human Rights.

History has more than amply demonstrated that state churches give the church the power of secular law. In short, church dogma becomes law. And that leads to religious persecution and such things as the Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials, which occurred in 1692, some ninety-nine years before the adoption of the Bill of Rights (including the First Amendment) in 1791. For modern examples of state religions, look at some countries in the Middle East:   oppression of women, including making them dress from head to foot in black bags, public beheadings, stonings, chopping off hands as a punishment for petty theft. . . .

State religions, David? Definitely not a good idea!!

Don Firth