John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Below I will copy and paste a brief point to a speech given when the nation watched a Catholic trying to enter the White House by the front door, as chief resident, and somehow kept Richard Nixon, the shoe-in at bay. How he did this was to confront the issues America feared about a Catholic president, as I feel President Obama has tried to do. Faith especially in America, should be a private matter between a man and his  own sensibilities, and here I now quote him verbatim.


[B]ecause I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured -- perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again -- not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me -- but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute - where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated a s an act against all.

I have been blessed with many friends who vehemently oppose religion as do I! Some who oppose any idea of God whatsoever, and although it troubles my Spirit, the America I believe in allows this in the very Constitution. It is a fundamental right to your own thoughts being sacrosanct, but if you need a holy man to tell you how to vote, you need to stop and go back to your God and find out why you are not hearing from him directly.

I take counsel from many,(even atheists), but i trust my God for my answers.

Blessings on the penultimate day of February.