This story furnishes more evidence (as if more evidence is needed) that politics is becoming a religious war.

Want to know how Americans will vote next Election Day? Watch what they do the weekend before.

If they attend religious services regularly, they probably will vote Republican by a 2-1 ratio. If they never go, they are likely to vote Democratic by a 2-1 ratio.

This relatively new fault line in American life is a major reason the country is politically polarized. And the division over religion and politics is likely to continue or even grow in 2004.

Homosexuality is a defining issue for evangelicals, Chang says, because "it calls into question what the authority is governing your beliefs and your group. Is it changing public opinion or is it Scripture?" He argues that the debate is really a table-setter for the biggest issues to come, when genetic cloning and manipulation of human biology take center stage. "At root is: Do we all have the right to self-define?"

He fears that if evangelicals cede too much ground on homosexuality in the battle to preserve their welcome in intellectual hothouses like Boston, they may ultimately sacrifice their ability to win the war. (via Instapundit.)

The bottom line, according to an increasingly large, constantly growing number of people, is that we have a religious war right here in the United States. Party of God versus Party of Secular Heathenism?

(And if you don't fit, about all you can do is get all pissed off and blog.)

Is religious war in the United States a good thing? I have complained about it from day one, and I can't stand it. I want it to stop. I want the Republicans to go back to being decent, civilized human beings who believed that Americans' privacy was their own business and not that of government. Religious wars should be fought somewhere else, because religion is personal.

Hey, isn't sex supposed to be personal too? I can remember the time when both religion and sex were personal. But now, even the most personal things we do are everyone else's business -- and therefore the business of government.

Last night I posted (as a long update) an email from a man named Vernon Robinson who clearly thinks heavy-handed fundamentalist religious views must be promoted, aided and abetted by government. Prominent, mainstream Republicans are backing him. The philosophy appears to be that it's OK for him to be doing that, especially because his anti-sex pitch masquerades as minority self-help:

For instance, the greatest threat facing young blacks today has nothing to do with white racism or displaying the Confederate flag - it is ILLEGITIMACY, which has reached a shameful 71% among American blacks.

A lack of morality and personal responsibility is at the root of the problem.

I do not countenance social engineering of either the "conservative" or the "liberal" variety. That it must be excused because it happens to be directed towards black people strikes me as patronizing in the extreme. Black people are not children -- any more than the American people are children.

Unless, of course you think that we're all in a vast national kindergarten -- or that the American people are all a bunch of sheep in need of a shepherd.

I don't. And I am staying on the "anti" side of this detestable "Culture War." Sex versus religion is a false dichotomy -- at least as false as guns versus penises.

The whole Culture War stinks.

Definitely un-American.

UPDATE: You'd think that after all my howling about false dichotomies, I wouldn't have missed that first one (the quote from Chang in the Boston Globe) staring me right in the face:

[which] authority is governing your beliefs and your group. Is it changing public opinion or is it Scripture?

A classic false dichotomy; a non-choice being cast as the only "choice."

Right there, staring me in the face. And I missed it!

(Well it was early this morning, and I was feeling rushed....)