Go ahead and cheat a friend. Their tune is still carried today by those who would tear down the wall of separation between church and state, thus cheapening both religion and government while bulldozing our freedom of or from religion. Ed Tant Last month in these pages, Executive Editor Les Simpson managed to stir up a tempest in a baptismal font by writing a couple of columns about what he called ''a mythical separation of church and state,'' words that parroted TV preacher, Republican shill and Christian Coalition top gun Pat Robertson who has called the Jeffersonian doctrine of church-state separation ''a myth'' and ''a lie of the left.'' Here in Athens and around the nation, the real myth seems to be the myth of the liberal media. Those who want a theocracy in this somewhat free country would be well advised to settle somewhere like Iran, where church and state are merged. Some of those authoritarian Americans might fit in well among the ayatollahs.
Delta is ready when they are.
For the rest of us, the separation of church and state is not a myth, but a mantra. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was quite correct in 1947 when he wrote, ''The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributors. Those who think that Christian prayer in schools and at sporting events will provide some sort of panacea for our perilous times should look back at the segregated South of the Jim Crow era. America has the highest church attendance of any Western nation, yet conservative Christian commentators continue to push the big lie that Christians are somehow discriminated against.