One of the biggest news stories after the recent Presidential election was the political division of America. The colorful Electoral College map, with states voting for Kerry in blue and states voting for Bush in red, showed anything but a united America, with the heart of the country soaked in red and the coasts of the country tinged in blue. Exit polls showed that the ambiguous term "moral values" was the hot button for most voters, causing them to pull the lever, push the button, or punch the paper hole for their candidate of choice. One reporter proclaimed that the minds and hearts of the American people have never been more split since the Civil War.

Being a good citizen, not to mention unemployed and in need of cash, I worked my district’s polls on Election Day. I can personally testify that the voting public was indeed quite fractious. Poll workers are strictly forbidden to practice electioneering (making any mention of political issues, parties, or candidates while working the polls). Still, while checking hundreds of driver’s licenses and alphabetizing over one thousand voter signature cards, I couldn’t help overhearing some debates between voters, and a few poll workers bending the "no electioneering" rule to the breaking point. Kerry supporters derided Bush’s foreign and economic policies, while Bush fans hammered Kerry for his supposed flip-flopping and liberalism. It wasn’t hard to predict which button voters would push once they stepped behind the blue curtain.

Given this nation’s odd relationship with religion, it should come as no surprise that we are so split on moral issues. Our founding fathers seemed a bit confused about the place, if any, of God in government. The First Amendment states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Yet, most of our founding fathers, in their writings and speeches, often pointed to God and the divine plan He held for our new nation. Today, conservatives claim that religious tradition (the Christian religion, that is) is woven into the fabric of our nation, and to remove that religious tradition would be to unravel the very fabric of our society. In a desperate attempt to "save" our nation, they pray feverishly, legislate morality, and even erect monuments to the Christian religion on government property.

(When I attended my poll worker orientation class, I was shocked and outraged by the New Castle County poll manual’s list of items to be displayed prominently at all polls. Listed amongst such common sense items as writing utensils, voter instructions posters, and signature cards, was the Bible.)

In my opinion, conservatives misinterpret and sometimes ignore outright the Constitution’s ban on establishing religion as part of our laws. Along with thousands of judges and history scholars, I interpret the First Amendment in its most basic, logical way, that we should make no laws forcing a religion on a person, but that we should make no laws disallowing a person to practice their religion of choice. In the days of our founding fathers, this interpretation kept the various factions of Christianity from fighting that could tear our nascent nation apart. In today’s world, we must expand the "living, breathing document" to protect those of all religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism—and particularly those who practice no religion whatsoever. It seems to me that today, one of the last minorities who remain as acceptable targets for slander and discrimination, are atheists and agnostics.

In the best interests of this nation’s future, we must work diligently to ensure that all Americans can practice the religion of their choice, publicly criticize other religions if they wish to do so, and have no religion in their lives whatsoever if that is their desire. Nations with a vested interest in religion do not function well and eventually fall from infighting, as we should have learned by now from ancient civilizations and many mid-east countries. Neither does the legislation of morality work for long-term benefit. We should have learned that lesson from prohibition, which spawned massive amounts of organized crime and caused the government untold monetary costs in its efforts to enforce an unenforceable law.

The role of our government, and any successful government, must be to maximize the rights of all people while minimizing restrictions on those people. Some would argue that the abolition of slavery is an example of legislating morality, but the real purpose of abolishing slavery was to preserve the rights of an abused minority. No country, including our own, has ever improved itself by limiting the right to do anything that does not impede upon the rights of another person. For this reason, I cannot comprehend why some Americans oppose gay marriage rights. By extending rights to a marginalized group of citizens, when it hurts no one else, we can only strengthen the democratic resolve of America. To argue that gay marriage will offend God or certain religious groups, is to make a law regarding the establishment of religion, and this is strictly forbidden in our Constitution, the vital document at the core of our nation. Only with prohibition did we pass a Constitutional amendment taking away a right. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work with gay marriage, either.

Legislating morality not only does not work and often punishes those who suffer abuses at the hands of the powerful, but it often causes great harm beyond taking away rights from the people. For example, before the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade in 1973, when abortion was illegal, thousands of American women lost their lives or were seriously maimed, many of them losing their ability to bear future children, at the hands of negligent and insidious "back alley" abortion providers. Banning abortion is an abuse of power by those in political office. When President George W. Bush signed into law the partial-birth abortion ban, there he sat at his ceremonial table, flanked on either side by grinning white men and not one woman. Catch the irony?