Here’s Mitt Romney making it clear that he separates church and state.

He’s not a spokesman for the Mormon church, as he has explained, and he doesn’t think that theological stances ought to be the deciding factor in how politicians govern.

This is far from pathetic. It’s the same stance Kennedy took. It’s a time honored tradition in the U.S.

Imagine if Obama were put to the same test. What could he say? The Bible isn’t all that ambiguous on the topic, and he’s an avowed Christian. Any answer he might give would necessarily break either with literal believers, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, or with the secular humanist majority.

And it’s irrelevant, to a politician who separates church and state, what he believes about whether this, that, or the other is a sin. From the mainstream Christian perspective, drunkeness is a sin, but we don’t outlaw it. And he wouldn’t want to.

Gluttony likewise. And sloth. The list is endless. Decisions about which laws to promote, which bills to veto, and so forth, must be made on the basis of what is good for national cohesion, national economics, and so forth. People will have to tend to their own souls.

We could look at peoples’ personal lives and get a clue as to what they believe sinful. Maybe. But people do all sorts of things that they will readily acknowledge to be sinful.

Romney’s personal life is about as clean as you’re going to find, by all evidence currently available. And on the other hand, he has no record at all of any busybody tendencies.

This is basic, beginner American philosophy. And it’s far from “pathetic”.