“Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.”

Had Mitt Romney simply left it at that, he’d have passed the biggest sniff-test on his religion by giving the public a sworn commitment to which it could hold him. This is what JFK did, greasing the wheels for his own galloping folly of an administration.

Yet I can’t see how Romney’s speech, taken as a whole, doesn’t come off as anything other than a verbal and philosophical disaster. Take this fatuous remark:

“We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

There is no such thing as the “religion of secularism.” It ranks not as even a cute form of semantic jujitsu. An atheist who goes to the Supreme Court asking that his son be excused from delivering a pledge of allegiance with the words “Under God” in it is an atheist who chooses not to be anesthetized by warm consensus and to hold the First Amendment to its own clear language. There is nothing “religious” in this. Laws exist either to be broken or upheld. Although it is refreshing to see the faithful using the term pejoratively, sneeringly for a change — if only they followed this line of thought to its logical conclusion.

“The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.

“Under God” was a phrase used by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. It was then added, at the bullying insistence of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 as way of underscoring our providential mission in the cold war. In neither case is this meaningless preposition a gift from the founders.

But what should really set one’s teeth on edge is this bit from Romney’s speech:

And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.

A fine follow-up sentence would be: “So do those Americans without belief.” Alas, too bad for Mitt. I wasn’t voting for him anyway, but now I count him a political enemy.

Update: Hitchens on same here (hat at jaunty angle tip - Mustafa in comments).

Audio of Hitchens on The Hugh Hewitt Show.

That is what The Guardian headline calls poor little Samina Malik. Has she been sentenced to transportation? Torture? Even jail? No. But she has certainly been sentenced. Unjust. Unjust.

Burton [her defence] said: “She became hooked on Abu Hamza-type addresses and that affected her mindset.” The jury was told that she joined an extremist organisation called Jihad Way, set up explicitly to spread terrorist propaganda and support for al Qaida.Jonathan Sharp, prosecuting, told the court she visited a website linked to the jailed cleric Abu Hamza and stored material about weapons. The court also heard Malik belonged to a social networking website called hi5, describing her interests as “helping the mujaheddin in any way which I can”.Under favourite TV shows, she listed: “Watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading ones, watching video messages by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri and other videos which show massacres of the kaffirs.”

Extracts from the poems are helpfully given, only, alas, in odd lines that cannot help the reader appreciate the full lyrical grace of the whole.:

One poem, called The Living Martyrs, said: “For the living martyrs are awakening/ And kuffars [non-believers] world soon to be shaking.”Another line ran: “Let us make jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine.”A second poem was called How to Behead. “It’s not as messy or as hard as some may think/ It’s all about the flow of the wrist,” it read.Another section said: “No doubt that the punk will twitch and scream/ But ignore the donkey’s ass/ And continue to slice back and forth/ You’ll feel the knife hit the wind and food pipe/ But don’t stop/ Continue with all your might.”

Ah, the sufferings of poets for their art! Those dreadful kaffirs! Perhaps she will write more valuable poems while in the discomfort of her own home. Why not just call her a poet-in-residence?The minor fact that she is a repulsive human being is not, of course, a crime. The delicate rococo charm of her poetry surpasses all such considerations.We kaffirs are once again guilty of Islamophobia. As Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain said:

Many young people download objectionable material from the Internet, but it seems if you are a Muslim then this could lead to criminal charges, even if you have absolutely no intention to do harm to anyone else.

On the other hand, death is too good for Salman Rushdie. Natch.  

Lisa Schiffren responds to the Top of the Pops with the sensible proposition that there is only one critical question to resolve:

Thick latkes or thin?