Kiffmeyer running for Olson’s House seat

Former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer announced this weekend that she will run for the Minnesota House seat currently occupied by Mark Olson, who was convicted last summer of domestic assault.

Olson, of Big Lake, was later expelled from the House Republican caucus, and now may run as an independent for re-election.

WCCO cites Kiffmeyer, also of Big Lake, as saying, “We’ve got to move into the issues … We’ve got to get out of the other stuff. The district needs to move forward now and we’re not doing that.”

“Other stuff,” huh? The team here at Minnesota Monitor has compiled some great quotes from the former Republican secretary of state, who lost her 2006 bid for a third term to DFLer Mark Ritchie. In a January interview with Paul Schmelzer, Kiffmeyer said of the idea of a separation of church and state:

MK: The quote from Thomas Jefferson, the firewall that was created was from the government intruding on religion. That was a quote taken out of his letter to the Baptist Society that said, don’t worry, the government won’t intrude on your religion, because there’s this wall of separation. It was a separation and a wall to keep the government from messing with religion. Obviously, how do you keep people of faith from never having an opinion from government? What segment of society are you going to say shouldn’t? Because I would say, other than the atheists — which, by the way, that’s a religious group, too –

PS: It is?

MK: Atheism is a belief that there is no god. So really, between atheists and Christians and all these others … how many people are left then to have an influence on government if it’s to go the other way? So the wall of separation was intended to say, “you can have freedom to flourish in your religion, OK, and the government won’t mess with your religion.”

You have the freedom. But there’s no such thing as an unlimited freedom. In other words you can’t cry “Fire!” in a theater. That’s the most common example. … Slander is another one; there’s laws against free speech so you can’t slander. Except, by the way, for politicians. You can slander politicians with impunity. So you can slander us.

So slandering politicians is OK, you can’t cry “Fire!” in a theater, and the separation of church and state was simply to prevent government from messing with religion. Not the other way around, and certainly not to prevent one religion, perhaps one that counts a voting majority among its members, from messing with other religions. Gotcha.

At least two other Republicans are seeking the seat, as well as two DFLers. As of last night, Kiffmeyer had not yet filed with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board.