By now, you've all seen this video of Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell -- who, as Daily Intel pointed out, was a Constitutional Government fellow at the Claremont Institute -- being ignorant about the Constitution. She asks where in the Constitution it says "separation of church and state," and the answer, of course, is in the very First Amendment. What I can't decide is whether she's genuinely ignorant, or studiously so. There is a cohort of Americans who'd rather not deal with the fundamental openness of the country's founding document, created by men who could see times of change in the future and wanted an agile country that could respond. To handle their cognitive dissonance, they just assert things that aren't true and ignore all facts to the contrary. Whether O'Donnell really fundamentally misunderstands the Constitution, or whether this is a coded (mis)understanding she shares with others who would rather not believe in the separation of church and state, is the question.
-- Monica Potts