In an extraordinary and frightening blow to America's so-called freedom of religion, the Texas State Comptroller has taken away the Unitarian Church's tax exempt status. Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn declared that the church isn't a religious organization because it "does not have one system of belief."

Using that reasoning, Strayhorn will have to take the tax-exempt status away from Christianity, too. To say that the Catholic church and the Pentecostal church do not represent "one system of belief" is stretching understatement to its breaking point.

The Unitarian Church does not have a doctrinal creed; hence, it attracts everyone from Christians to Jews to agnostics to atheists. The church does have a set of guides for living, and the concept of God is very real to
many Unitarians. Unitarian ministers go through ordination, just like other ministers, and they preside over births, marriages and deaths.

Ms. Strayhorn, who is wearing a huge cross in her official State of Texas photograph,
is the mother of the fundamentalist Christian right wing White House's official spokesman, Scott McClellan.

Of course, it's easy to understand the right wing's fear of the Unitarian Church because it is a church that encourages thinking. Several U.S. presidents were Unitarians, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft. Some of the other founding father Unitarians were Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine. Other notable American Unitarians were Abigail Adams, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Adlai Stevenson.

Today the Unitarians. Which religion on the Christian fundamentalist enemy list will be next?