If my Mother were still available to give me advice, she’d suggest that I should not begin the season of Lent harboring impious thoughts... I’d say to her that impious isn’t the exactly right word anyway... that I’d checked my thesaurus for near-synonyms of impious (ungodly, unholy, irreligious, sinful, wicked, immoral, unrighteous, sacrilegious, heretical, profane, blasphemous, irreverent) and none of them even come close to my thoughts and feelings about the muddle, or should I say puddle, into which presidential hopefuls Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum have haplessly wandered. Those guys go from silly to sillier. They’ve spent the past couple of days talking about President Obama’s faith, or his lack of it, and whether or not America should believe him when he says he is not a Muslim. Romney’s comment on the issue is that Obama is anti-religious, that he has “fought against religion.” He and Gingrich, who says Obama “has been relentlessly hostile to traditional religions,” finally agree on something. Not to be left out of the discussion, Santorum has accused President Obama of “systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian principles.”

Apparently they haven’t heard what the President said when he spoke last week at the National Prayer Breakfast describing how his faith as a Christian informs his thinking as a leader. The President said, “We can’t leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel -- the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action -- sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance.”