Craziest Republican of the Day: Glen Urquhart

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Christine O'Donnell is the main Delaware Republican in the news, but she certainly doesn't have a monopoly on craziness, not with Glen Urquhart around. (Urquhart was nominated to fill Mike Castle's state-wide House seat, Castle having been defeated by O'Donnell in the Republican Senate primary.)

Just check out this rather appalling statement, as reported by Right Wing Watch:

Do you know, where does this phrase separation of Church and State come from? Does anybody know? ... Actually, that's exactly, it was not in Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. He was reassuring that the federal government wouldn't trample on their religion. The exact phrase "separation of Church and State" came out of Adolph Hitler’s mouth, that's where it comes from. Next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State ask them why they're Nazis.

That's right, Urquhart attributes Jefferson's famous "separation of Church and State" line to none other than Hitler. But of course it was Jefferson who said it, or wrote it -- and it does in fact appear in his 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Urquhart is crazy -- and also, apparently, a complete idiot whose whole shtick seems to consist of calling his opponents Nazis. Evidently, though, he's also so utterly un-American as to think that one of the cornerstones of American democracy, as articulated by Jefferson, is some Nazi plot.

When you mistake Jefferson for Hitler and seek to overturn the Constitution, you're pretty fucking crazy, just like O'Donnell.