Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU) is a bogus political action group that fails to acknowledge the deep religious faith of our founders, ignores their reliance on prayer and their frequent invocations of our Creator, and avoids mentioning their belief in divine providence. Instead, the group latches onto a few select quotes and phrases, striped from their context and redefined, in order to advance an anti-Christian agenda (though they claim to be Christians themselves).

AU and its allies are constantly filing lawsuits to prevent graduates from praying, to strip courthouses and public buildings of Christian symbols and messages, and to remove any mention of God from our national seals, flags, names, pledges, monuments and currency. And though our nation has a long history of public devotion to God through prayer, AU does its best to prevent politicians and candidates from talking about their faith, seeking God’s guidance or encouraging the nation to pray.

So it is astounding, if not humorous, to find AU complaining today about the actions of three people who disrupted a prayer.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State today deplored the disruption by Religious Right activists of a Hindu chaplain’s prayer to open the U.S. Senate.

“This shows the intolerance of many Religious Right activists,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “They say they want more religion in the public square, but it’s clear they mean only their religion.

So when is it necessary to disrupt prayer, and when is it deplorable?

According to AU, it is always necessary to disrupt prayer, especially Christian prayer, unless the disruption allows AU and its Secular Left allies to paint the entire Religious Right movement as intolerant and deplorable; in those cases alone do our God-given and Constitutionally-protected freedoms of speech and religion remain viable.

If you’ve called or e-mailed lately — sorry, I’ll get back to you eventually. We’ve been away for a few days, visiting with relatives in the dead zone where internet, cell phones and other modern inconveniences cannot operate.

What have I missed, other than being nominated for various offices and awards? Thanks for your confidence, guys, Scrappy-Doo and I are honored, really. But my current workload is plenty for me at the moment, and I’m happy with my humble little slice of the blogosphere. What else is going on?

We’re headed east for the weekend, and I’m loading up my iPod Shuffle with some songs, books on tape and podcasts. One podcast I’m looking forward to catching up on is a series titled We The People Stories, a lectureship hosted by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. These are very high quality lectures and round-table discussions that provoke thought, unfailingly represent many sides of the issues, dig deep into relevant cultural, legal, religious, historical and political topics, as well as showcase new scholarship and research. I highly recommend checking it out. Are there any podcasts you find noteworthy?

I thought something unusual might be happening when I watched the video of Fred Thompson arriving in Nashville and saw that TN GOP Chairman Bob Davis was the first guy to walk through the door. It appears my instincts were correct, as Davis soon afterward announced that he will step down as chairman to join the Thompson campaign.

So who will lead the state party now? The first name to jump out was State Sen. Paul Stanley of Germantown, who apparently had a heads-up. State Rep. Stacey Campfield of Knoxville has been following the developments pretty closely and continues to consider different names, as have Terry Frank and Rob Huddleston.

Another local name I’ve heard in the mix is our own Shelby County Chairman Bill Giannini. I hope people take a look at what he’s done here, helping the party win 76% of its races last year, in an area that is trending more and more Democratic every day. He’s a very charismatic guy, well spoken and down to earth. And he plays a mean guitar; how can you beat that?

The Wendi Thomas column in today’s Commercial Appeal deserves a fisking. Thomas, who previously admitted to her own racist attitudes, is upset with the recent Supreme Court ruling against racial discrimination.

Thomas says the court with this ruling has taken “a good-sized step” toward her 2004 prediction that it would, with President Bush’s guidance, force the columnist to work “on a plantation somewhere, picking cotton.”

She writes that the ruling “restricts how race can be used to manage diversity,” with “manage[d] diversity” being her favored euphemism for racial discrimination. She bristles, in fact, at Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” calling this rationale “simple-minded in its simplicity.”

Thomas says she doubts the court’s professed belief in the importance of racial diversity, and chalks up the decision to the power of a special interest:

This, of course, is a nod to those few but vocal white people who have convinced themselves that whenever their individual wishes must bend (not bow) in the interest of an integrated society, they are the victims of cruel discrimination.

Thomas doesn’t betray much awareness of the majority’s actual arguments, though, so where she writes that she’s “waded through as much of the 185-page ruling as [she] could without vomiting in disgust,” we can assume that’s code for “not at all.”

Indeed, while the columnist Thomas is found here to be a deeply paranoid, scarcely informed alarmist, Thomas the Supreme Court Justice offers a well-reasoned and convincing concurring opinion that counters most of her objections.

Wendi writes that if the court were interested in diversity, “it would allow local governments some leeway in determining how best to desegregate schools,” or in other words, discriminate on the basis of race.

As Justice Thomas points out, however, neither of the two school boards in the case “asserts that its race-based actions were taken to remedy prior discrimination.”

Seattle provides three forward-looking — as opposed to remedial — justifications for its race-based assignment plan… and at oral argument, counsel for Louisville disavowed any claim that Louisville’s argument “depend[ed] in any way on the prior de jure segregation.”

But Wendi Thomas continues in her ignorance, claiming the court “conveniently dismisses four centuries of government-sanctioned discrimination.” Where those four centuries of government sanctions begin and end, though, I’m not sure. This week we celebrate the 231st birthday of the Declaration of Independence, and our Constitution wasn’t ratified until 1788. Accordingly, our national government falls short of the columnist’s time frame by roughly 180 years.

Instead, the majority offered the blather that the Constitution is colorblind, the very suggestion of which is patently offensive. Colorblindness is to be in denial of our differences, willfully ignorant of what makes us unique. If you insist you don’t see my color, it’s easy to dismiss any concerns I have about race relations.

To be colorblind means to lack racial prejudice, a concept Thomas fails to grasp in more than one sense. And if the columnist’s uniqueness depends entirely on the color of her skin, that’s news to Martin Luther King and those who revere his legacy.

Finally, after all this harping, Wendi declares that the court’s decision “doesn’t mean much.”

And that’s precisely where I wished she would have reached that conclusion about 400 words earlier.