Get yer red-hot Bibles

As if we didn't know already, the rapist/huckster presidential candidate Donald Trump has created an even deeper bottom than he's ever drilled to before.

A few days ago, Trump offered us his version of the King James Bible, complete with an addendum of the United States Constitution, all for the low, low price of $59.99. Trump calls it his "God Bless the USA" Bible. And just in time for Holy Week.

Hurry. Come get yer red-hot Bibles before they're gone. Let's make America pray again. 

You don't have to look far to see that this is just another scheme – like his recent unveiling of Trump gold lame sneakers – to raise money to help pay his mounting legal fees. 

How incredibly offensive. On several counts.

His intended audience is clearly the evangelical Christian nationalists who, by blindly following the cult of Trump, have shown themselves to be a cult of hypocrites themselves. These people once followed the teachings of Jesus Christ. Now they are following the dictates of the Antichrist. There's no other way to describe this inappropriate indignity. Selling Bibles for personal gain.

Wouldn't a true Christian – and especially a professed billionaire – donate the sales of the teachings of Jesus Christ to benefit the poor, the destitute, the hungry?

One of the first things that struck me about Trump's latest loathsome endeavor was how he shamelessly combined government with religion: the Bible and the US Constitution in one leather-bound package. It's kind of a weak but obvious ploy to declare that only Christians can be patriots.

You, too, can be a God-fearing patriot for only $59.99 (Translation: help pay for my legal fees and vote for me).

And yet, in the 235-year history of this constitutional republic, there always has been a clear separation of church and state. It was intentional – the Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. There are 4,543 words in the constitution, and not a single one of them is the word "God."

The Founders were ever conscious of the persecution the pilgrims endured in their break from the Church of England, the state church.

It was not going to happen here.

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries," wrote James Madison, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution.

In the First Amendment we find two provisions about church and state: the Establishment Clause and the Exercise Clause.

The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from "establishing" a religion. The Free Exercise Clause protects a person's right to practice religion as they please.

The country was to be a democracy, not a theocracy.

Thomas Jefferson was the first to coin the phrase "separation of church and state" in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, a religious minority that feared religious persecution. In his letter, Jefferson, then the president, cited that the free exercise and establishment clauses, in unison, built "a wall of separation between church and state."

And so it has been since 1789.

But now we have a former president who is also a current presidential candidate hawking bibles overtly  and intentionally combining church and state. It's dangerous. It's divisive. It's anti-constitutional. Because of Trump, who shows no moral values whatsoever, much less Christian values (think porn star Stormy Daniels. Think Trump rape victim E.J. Carroll. Think 4,000 migrant children torn from their families; six years later, hundreds are still to be reunited), we now live in an era of rising antisemitism and attempted Muslim bans. Are these groups – and others – finding religious freedom in this country, or are they finding persecution instead? Are we becoming what we were never intended to be? In Trump's narrow vision, it would appear so.

The irony is that Trump is hawking his Bible (which he cynically claims is his favorite book while grinning his Elmer Gantry grin) with the U.S. Constitution included, when it's clear he has read neither.

The First Amendment not only guarantees us free speech, but freedom of religion as well. And hopefully, freedom from Trump.

And it's Holy Week.