Hitchens on the Importance of Secularism

Christopher Hitchens has an interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal about the danger posed by the theocon takeover of the Republican party. It's not a complete takeover, of course, there are still big splits in the party and other factions that balance them out, but their degree of influence is quite frightening. Hitchens quotes conservative icon Barry Goldwater, who famously opposed the growth in power of the religious right within the party. Best quote from the essay:

Then again, hundreds of thousands of young Americans are now patrolling and guarding hazardous frontiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is there a single thinking person who does not hope that secular forces arise in both countries, and who does not realize that the success of our cause depends on a wall of separation, in Islamic society, between church and state? How can we maintain this cause abroad and subvert it at home? It's hardly too much to say that the servicemen and -women, of all faiths and of none, who fight so bravely against jihad, are being stabbed in the back by the sunshine soldiers of the "crusading" right. What is one to feel but rage and contempt when one reads of Arabic-language translators, and even Purple Heart-winning frontline fighters, being dismissed from the service because their homosexuality is accounted a sin?

Quite so.