I’ve noticed that this year in the mainstream press there are far more articles than ever before about the lack of religious diversity among the candidates for U.S. President.

It’s certainly not news that those who seek our country’s highest office are always professed Christians of one brand or another, usually standard issue Protestant. Republican Mitt Romney’s Mormonism caused a stir for a brief moment in time, precisely because it’s not the kind of Christianity that Americans are accustomed to hearing about. Defending his beliefs against the fundamentalist Christians who are extremely vocal and influential in his conservative party, Romney used the opportunity to bash those of us who are atheists or agnostics.

In one of the more nonsensical statements of his presidential bid, Romney said that “freedom requires religion.” Nothing could be further from the truth: Freedom demands freedom from religion and from the influence of religion in the political arena.

Romney added that those “who seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God...it is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America--the religion of secularism.”

Actually, I don’t want any new religions, there are far too many in the world already. Romney should know that removing God or the name of any other lightning-bolt thrower in the sky from our public domain was supposedly what the Founding Fathers intended.

While many Christians believe that the Founding Fathers only meant to establish freedom of religion for them, that is, the freedom to practice whatever designer label of Christianity they choose, many scholars think otherwise. They contend that the Founding Fathers actually wanted a government that didn’t endorse or promote any human belief system.

American voters most definitely favor the religion with the guy on the cross. Why else would anyone even care whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or a Christian?

Last year, a Pew Research Center poll found that 63% of Americans were “less likely” to vote for a presidential contender who didn’t believe in God.

While many barriers are being broken down in the political arena, especially this year with a woman and a black man duking it out for the Democratic nomination, one very unbreakable glass ceiling remains: America will probably never elect an avowed atheist or even an agnostic to the White House.

Not within my lifetime at least.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical Southern Italian atheist queer performer and writer with a website: www.avicollimecca.com