Others who share the concerns of Mainstream Loudoun...

The millions of Christians in this country reflect just about every conceivable political point of view. For one highly conservative group to proclaim itself "the Christian Coalition" strikes me as decidedly un-Christian arrogance.... We reflect countless races, religions and lifestyles, and we often differ on questions of morality and behavior. The only way so diverse a nation can survive is by all of us practicing a high degree of tolerance. But tolerance is not the way of the Christian right. Its leaders want to impose their one-size-fits-all morality on everyone. It won't work. When any group tries to impose its values on everyone else, the result will inevitably be resentment, hatred and violence.
Senator Warren Rudman's Farewell Address, excerpted from Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate


The great decisions of government cannot be dictated by the concerns of religious factions.... We have succeeded for 205 years in keeping the affairs of state separate from the uncompromising idealism of religious groups and we mustn't stop now. To retreat from that separation would violate the principles of conservatism and the values upon which the framers built this democratic republic.

Barry M. Goldwater, Speech to the U.S. Senate, September 16, 1981


Too often, people have yielded to the temptation to use religious affirmation as a one-way, unanswerable contribution to public argument--'I believe this because my religion says it, and that's that'--or to interpret the existence of other views as hostility to one's own religion and its claims.

Amy E. Schwartz, The Washington Post, April 24, 1996