separation of church and state

ok, so there are a few things that mm holds dear....among them the absolute separation of church and state....the world has been there/done that with caesar, the popes, and kings of england prior to henry VIII.......and we don't need to go back.....so i really appreciated an article in today's new yorker about the similarities between jfk and kerry on the same subject....the following has been borrowed from the new yorker article....

On September 12, 1960, Senator Kennedy, under pressure to confront what was quaintly known as the “religious issue,” appeared before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. “It is apparently necessary for me to state once again—not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in,” he said that day.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference. . . .
I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral levels, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.


With a bit of spiffing up for gender-pronoun correctness, it is just barely possible to imagine such a speech being delivered today by Senator Kerry. Could the same be said of President Bush?