Religion Requires Roller Skates

Hunter at DKos:

This is just an aside, but one of the things that has struck me about the Republican candidates this season is just how dismal their speeches have all been. Case in point, the Romney "religion" speech, where he announced that "freedom requires religion."

The problem with that line isn't that it's somehow offensive, the problem is that it's embarrassingly ridiculous. You might as well say "freedom requires peanut butter", or "religion requires roller skates" and it'd make as much sense. It may pander to some particularly odd-headed religious base, yes, but at the price of making Romney look like an intellectual dunderhead willing to say anything that sounds good.

And that's completely unnecessary. He could have said "religion requires freedom", left it at that, and it'd be a defensible and noble-sounding position, and the speech would have been every bit as patronizing and kowtowing. But "freedom requires religion?" Ugh -- that's just historically, philosophically and logically silly. It sounds like a flub, not a planned line. So who is that supposed to appeal to, seriously? Why go for the line that just plain looks foolish -- and in a highly anticipated, highly crafted, highly agonized over (and, once delivered, highly disappointing and irrelevant) speech? Who put that dumb line in there? How did it sneak by the vetting process? Is that really the best case they could make for his position, which is, roughly, "um, religion is good. I like it?"

My bold.