Had he attended the conference in person, Casey would have heard Pavone compare the events of September 11, 2001 with an abortion procedure.

"Is there any difference that anyone can identify, morally speaking, between disregarding someone else's right to life if you use an airplane or if you use surgical forceps? What's the difference? What's the difference, morally speaking, if the victim is five feet tall or five inches tall? Those variables do not introduce any moral difference to the evil that we're talking about."

Casey should have ignored Vanderslice's reckless counsel for a variety of reasons, including that there was no reason to seek additional support from those who would never provide it. Contrary to Vanderslice's notions, engaging the leadership of the hard Religious Right does not demonstrate respect for "people of faith." Instead it sends a clear message of capitulation to the long discredited Aristotelian notion of inherent inequality. Any continued acceptance of this unnecessary strategy of pandering will have its ultimate end in the furthering weakening of liberal democracy.

But there is a greater issue here: competency. Why would Vanderslice and Common Good Strategies advise Casey to pay respects to a group of not-so-closeted economic royalists -- let alone Frank Pavone? Did she not consider Pavone's involvement with folks such as Tom Monaghan and US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS)? These are men whose economic agenda is clearly at odds with Casey's adherence to justice. Monaghan, for example, has hostility challenged efforts by Ave Maria employees to organize. More importantly, with all their neo- Carlist tendencies and wanting to impose on the rest of us their particular recipe for eternal salvation -- they are the true enemies of religious freedom.

Pavone is perhaps best known for his role in the Terri Schiavo affair as the "spiritual advisor" to the Schindler family. But his standing on the Religious Right will be underscored on March 2-3, 2007 when he will be a featured speaker at televangelist D. James Kennedy's Reclaiming America for Christ conference in Ft. Lauderdale. Florida one of the premier Religious Right political conferences in the U.S. Other featured speakers include Ann Coulter, Tony Perkins and Phyllis Schlafly. It is well known that all of these folks are hostile to liberal democracy-- especially when it comes to keeping church and state separate. But much less well known is their cynical use of religion as a means of undo the legacy of New Deal economics--a plan that had much of its basis in the Protestant Social Gospel and Catholic Distributive Justice movements. One has to wonder if Ms. Vanderslice thought about this aspect of her advice to pay homage, directly and indirectly to this cast of characters.

Ms. Vanderslice's pandering to the Religious Right is dangerous for a variety of reasons. First as Frederick Clarkson pointed out recently, she and Common Good Strategies recommended that the Democratic Party shy away from using the term "separation of church and state." That--just like her advice to kow-tow to the likes of PPN--is sign of spinelessness. Her argument that the term raises "red flags with people of faith," feeds the Religious Right's myth that the separation of church and state is synonymous with hostility towards religiosity. Beyond that, it sends out a message of fear, the scent of which the true enemies of religious freedom can detect from miles away. Indicative of her failure to appreciate the harm she has caused, is her bragging about her advice to candidates to The New York Times. Recommending that her client address to that group was, in my view, a betrayal of the progressive Christian values that she purports to represent.

Instead of trying to make nice to those who openly sneer at their values, Vanderslice and the folks at Common Good Strategies would be wise to take a page from the ACLU. Like the ACLU, they should tell their candidate clients to confront the likes of Pavone, Dr. Kennedy and Phyllis Shlafly, and embrace the concept of church-state separation by framing its meaning within the context of religious freedom. And when they do, they might consider the example of a Catholic schoolboy who understood the meaning and importance of separation of church and state as integral to the religious freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Thomas Whall was a Catholic student at the Elliot School in 1859 Boston. The school, although public, used Protestant prayers and followed Protestant theology. When young Whall was required to recite the King James version on the Ten Commandments, he refused on the grounds that Catholics abide by a different interpretation of the Second Commandment.

The King James translation of Second Commandment reads "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth[.]" This refers to "graven images instead of the Catholic version that states, "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name." For Whall and other Catholics, this was a rebuke of the Catholic use of shrines and statues. Whall's reward for making his stand for religious freedom was a sound whipping by his teachers.

The Vanderslices of the world must understand that pandering to the Religious Right may very well bring us back to a place we should never return. As the Whall affair teaches us, once certain Christian sects have the power to suppress non-Christians, they can well attempt to turn their suppression upon each other. It is not slippery-slope conjecture, but a hard-learned lesson of American history. And that, not religious hostility, is one of the primary reasons why Liberalism values the separation of church and state.

But perhaps the politcal take-away lesson for Vanderslice and associates should be that rather than pandering, it is better to make clear distinctions between Democrats and the Religious Right, and standing our ground rather than conceding it. Ever since the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy there has been a severe shortage of Liberals who have the courage to stand on principle-even when it is unpopular to do so. How many times have we heard former Reagan voters say that while they disagreed with his politics, they voted for him simply because he had the courage of his convictions? Clearly, there is a lesson to be learned about consistency, clarity and courage of our convictions.