[Originally posted by Mr. Dean Cook on his blog. Archived on this website with his permission.]

Dear Mr. Abbott:

    Unfortunately, I am too engaged in earning a living on the free market (made that much harder by your government's constant taxing and regulating) to write a long, or detailed response to your op-ed. I cannot rely on the taxpayers to pay for me to write for the Dallas Morning News.

    Fortunately, others have written many books and articles showing the fallacy of your historical revisionism regarding the philosophical basis of this country's founding and the founding fathers. You can find numerous quotes from our founding fathers at this web site, including this little gem:

From a letter to Charles Cushing (October 19, 1756): "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, 'this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.'" (John Adams, the second President of the United States)

    Another excellent article, written back in the 1980's, can be found in The Voice of Reason, entitled "Religion Versus America", by Leonard Peikoff. This article refutes the Conservative mythology that America is a "Christian nation". America is a child of the Enlightenment, which was a turn away from the ignorant, religious Middle Ages, and towards reason and this world.

    Another excellent book that I just finished reading is called God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens. This book delves into the sordid past of religion, which, until very recently, was a history of constant, institutionalized violence against human life (and still is in the Muslim world). This book also shows how all religions, including Islam, Christianity, Judiaism, and Buddhism are still a threat to human life today, with numerous examples from contemporary affairs.

    This all raises a question: why do you Republicans fight so hard on this issue, but your fight for Capitalism and private property rights is, lethargic at best? I guess what Ayn Rand said about the Conservatives is true:

    "The conservatives want freedom to act in the material realm; they tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material wealth. But, they advocate government control of man's spirit, i.e., man's consciousness; they advocate the State's right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education... But they advocate government control of material production... of all physical property... The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories -- with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe -- but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

    Yet it is the conservatives who are predominately religionists, who proclaim the superiority of the soul over the body... And it is the liberals who are predominately materialists... This is merely a paradox, not a contradiction: each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises. "Censorship: Local And Express", Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It)

    Since control in one realm, the material or the spiritual, necessitates control in the other, (restricting freedom of the press means restricting the private property rights of any man who owns a printing press), the Conservative "commitment" to private property rights is really illusory.

    At any rate, my eyes have been opened. I am done with the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. I will continue to vote Democrat, as I did for the first time last election cycle. There may not be as many secular Republican voters as there are religious, but if all of the secular Republican voters not only stop voting for your party, but also vote for the opposition, then they can leverage their relative small size, and hurt you twice as much at the ballot box.