Misty, you said a lot of what I deleted! But you were a lot nicer than I was, which is why I deleted my post. Right now it seems that in the U.S. it's the religious conservatives in political power rather than those of conservative political beliefs. Religion isn't even supposed to be part of the government. And I'm not attacking any political party here! To paraphrase Bill Maher, if you even suggest a democrat might be liberal he puts on an orange vest and heads into the woods to kill something. Politicians are by nature a wishy-washy group, but even the "liberals" in office seem to be fairly conservative.
Unless of course I'm just way crazy liberal and by comparison everyone else is conservative.
Haha.
I took a government class a couple years ago, one of those b.s. courses everyone has to take where they treat students like cattle and have a grad student tell you about the Constitution. There were about 250 students in my class. My instructor asked how many of us would vote for a presidential candidate who, when asked his religion, said something like, "I won't answer because there is no religious test for the presidency." Three of us raised our hands. Wow. I'm not religious myself and I'm not so concerned about the guy's religion. But from his answer I could be fairly sure he'd read the Constitution, and that would be good.
The problem is that there is a religious test for the presidency. It's cultural. A non-religious candidate has zero chance. It's sad because our government was never meant to be so tied up in religion.