Isn’t it ironic that fifty years ago the Republican electorate feared John F. Kennedy because they thought he would owe more allegiance to Rome than the American people. Now a strong plurality is lining up to support Rick Santorum who, while he doesn’t come out and say it, makes it clear that his allegiance is clearly aligned with Rome.

Just today I heard a Santorum sound byte claiming that people who support the President’s health care plan have surrendered their health to the government. What an interesting concept, the suggestion that we would let the government control our health.

He forgot to mention that he wants the Pope to control our health. This is the reason he and other Republicans like Newt opposed Obama’s move to require religious organizations to offer birth control to their employees. They believe the church should have the power to control our health.

As you know, I was raised Baptist Preacher’s Kid (BPK). I was taught that the Mormons and Catholics were a source of heresy and a threat to true faith. Today those same Christians are lining up behind a Mormon and two Catholic candidates to defend their faith. It seems to me that, by the standards I was raised with, the Christian right have allowed themselves to be led astray.

In fact, they seem determined to seat the enemies of Christ in the halls of government.

What is their strategy? Accuse the President of heresy. For example, this week Rick Santorum called the President’s beliefs: “”phony theology. Not a theology based on the bible, a different theology.” He went on to claim that the President was “exercising his values and trumping the values of the church.”

In other words, the church of Rome should dictate the values of the American people. Santorum would claim that the Pope’s values are the values of all Americans, but this is clearly wrong. This was also the reason why the founding fathers wanted to avoid an established religion.

Another hint that Santorum (and Gingrich) want to establish Catholicism as the official religion of Americans is the declaration that the evangelical Christians like President Obama have “a different set of moral values that they are imposing upon people who have a constitutional right to have their own values within the church.” He called this “a new low in this country’s history of religious freedom that we have never seen before.”

Does he think Obama is less of a Christian? When asked, Santorum claimed that “no one is suggesting that.” But, in fact, this is exactly what he’s doing. He is suggesting that the President’s evangelical beliefs, which are rooted in the concept of free will and the right of everyone to choose to accept or reject the path to salvation, should be sacrificed for his own, which is that Americans should be forced to comply with the dictates of the Catholic hierarchy.

This is not the America I signed up for.

The is not the America Jesus signed up for.

This is definitely not the America our founders signed up for.