Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-D), who believes that there was a Jan. 6 “insurrection” and that he has a chance to be president of the United States, is outraged at statements Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) made Sunday about the separation of church and state. On Wednesday, Kinzinger raged semi-coherently on Twitter: “There is no difference between this and the Taliban. We must opposed [sic] the Christian Taliban. I say this as a Christian.” The Christian Taliban! Did Boebert call for the beheading of unbelievers? The firebombing of girls’ schools? Throwing gays off the top of tall buildings? Not quite.
What Boebert did say was certainly controversial. Speaking at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colo., Boebert declared: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk — that’s not in the constitution. It was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like they say it does.” The “stinking letter” in question was one Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 that spoke of a “wall of separation between Church and State.” As commonly used as the “wall of separation” phrase is, it doesn’t appear in the Constitution, which says only that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
This means that there is to be no established, that is, government-supported, religion in the U.S. or government favoring of one religion over another.