Davey Henreckson is afraid I've missed his main point:

I am not try to whine-out about how the left behaves as badly as the right (though that, again, may be very true). I am trying to point out that partisans of both sides of the political spectrum use civil religion for their own purposes. And I would like to suggest that Senator Obama is just as guilty of this sin as Pat Robertson. It’s the whole plank-in-the-eye syndrome that plagues right and left-wingers.

Well, no, I got that. I'm no expert on these issues, but I'm not sure it's safe to say that "both sides of the political spectrum use civil religion for their own purposes." Yes, Obama, yes, Bill Clinton started the Faith-Based Initiatives under a different name. But then who? Carter was open about his evangelical Baptist beliefs, but he was also the one who signed into law the prohibition on religious academies receiving federal tax breaks. LBJ actually slipped the requirement that non-profits abstain from political activity into a bill, literally in the dead of night. You'd really have to go back to FDR's relief efforts to find anything comparable to what Obama's proposing.

All that being said, I'm happy to stipulate for the sake of argument that Democrats would use civil religion for political purposes, if it suited their needs. It's just that we have differentiate rhetorical strategies - which both parties have definitely used, ad nauseum - from actual governance. On the latter score, Republicans almost certainly come out ahead.

All that said, that wasn't even my point, which was mostly aimed at Dreher. Rod, as usual, sets up a false equivalence here, then charges Democrats with not living up to their end of the wankerrific structure he's built for them.

While there are legitimate concerns with Obama's proposal, no responsible commentator that I've seen so far has charged him with creeping theocracy. That, counter to that cretin Dreher, is not because they're hypocrites, but because they understand the difference between actual theocracy and a simple but troubling blurring of the lines between church and state.

Like Davey, I'm tied up in holiday weekend activities, but if you want to know more about the unsavory characters the Bush administration has associated with, and their fundamentally anti-democratic bent (all puns intentional), go read Talk to Action, then read up on the Blogs against Theocracy. It's all very educational and not a little bit creepy. Those guys really are theocrats, as they'll occasionally admit. By comparison, Obama has good intentions but is possibly on the wrong track.

So sure, that might be a speck in liberals' eye compared to the plank in conservatives' oracular apparatus. But the problem with that setup is that while liberals are fretting over their sins of judgment, conservatives are wrecking the joint. There are times when "a pox on both their houses" is the appropriate response, and there are times when you just have to call the B.S. for what it is. Or as Reinhold Niebuhr put it:

Men who are equally sinners in the sight of God need not be equally guilty of a specific act of wrongdoing in which they are involved. It is important to recognize that Biblical religion has emphasized the inequality of guilt just as much as the equality of sin.