Katherine Harris: Separation of church and state 'a lie'

[Cleo]

People like this frighten me and I place them in the same class as fanatics that fly planes into buildings.

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"...if you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin," she says in interview.

By Jim Stratton
Orlando Sentinel
Posted August 25 2006, 11:30 AM EDT

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said this week that the separation of church state is "a lie," that God did not intend for the United States to be a "nation of secular laws" and that a failure to elect Christians to political office will allow lawmaking bodies to "legislate sin."

In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention, Harris described her faith, saying it animates "everything I do," including her votes in Congress.



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She warned that if voters do not send Christians to office, they risk creating a government that is doomed to fail.

"If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin," she told interviewers, citing abortion and gay marriage as two examples of that sin.

Doing so, she said, "will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don't know better, we are leading them astray and it's wrong..."

Harris said that Americans "have internalized" the "lie" that church and state must not be mixed. In reality, she said, "we have to have the faithful in government" because that is God's will.

Separating religion and politics is "so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers," Harris said. "And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women," then "we're going to have a nation of secular laws. That's not what our founding fathers intended and that's (sic) certainly isn't what God intended."

Harris, a Republican from Longboat Key, is running against Orlando attorney Will McBride, retired Adm. LeRoy Collins and developer Peter Monroe in the GOP Senate primary. McBride and Collins also did interviews with Florida Baptist Witness. Monroe did not.

Both Collins and McBride, a lay minister and son of a pastor, say their faith is an important part of their lives, but Harris' responses most directly tie her role as a policy maker to her religious beliefs.