Brethren,
Peace and Good to all of you.
As you
know, every year during the holiday and Christmas seasons, religion-objectors
redouble their efforts at proscribing religious displays on government
buildings and other common areas in our cities, towns, and villages. The
mainstream media’s (MSM’s) strategy has been to declare that there is no “war
on Christmas” but Bill Donohue from the Catholic League already took
the MSM to task.
Of
course, I often share many of Bill Donohue’s observations across many other
social platforms including Twitter, and it was in Twitter where I got a couple
of respondents who are representative of the repressive school of Christmas
display haters. Their argument is straightforward: they argue that the “non-establishment
clause” of the First Amendment prohibits religious displays on public –
government-owned – property. Therefore, a Christmas crèche, the Ten Commandments,
and other demonstrations of religious faith that have had an effect in our
culture for over two centuries are verboten
under the First Amendment.
But
confusion follows when the Christmas-haters are shown the applicable clause of
the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof
When I ask how a religious display on public property
violates the non-establishment clause, I get stammers. If I mention that the
Framers had a very precise idea of what an established
religion meant (they only had to look back to England, the German states,
and Spanish Empire to make their point), I am told that the Framers “knew
nothing” about today’s circumstances – which I detect as an argument in favor
of the notion that “the Constitution evolves” although they don’t tell me exactly
how. Or if I point out that these displays were never an issue until the 1960’s,
when Madeline Murray O’Hair started her jihad against religion in the public
place, I am answered with non-sequiturs regarding the legal status of atheists
in the country, on how the US is not nor was ever a “Christian” country, etc.
After all my years studying this issue, I hereby announce
my position on this issue. If you care to read it, this is it:
The
First Amendment does not prohibit religious displays on public land. Citizens of any religious persuasion or none
at all should be free to exercise their religion on public, government property
however they see fit. The only proper
role of government is to regulate this exercise in such a way that decorum,
order, and safety are guaranteed to those citizens choosing to exercise their
liberty in this manner.
In other words, my brothers and sisters, I don’t simply
want the courts or the religion-haters to be more accommodating to religious
expression in public spaces. No, what I
am looking for is their complete
capitulation. I hold that every single verdict, judgment, or regulation
limiting the free exercise of religion anywhere
runs counter to the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, that such
judgments, verdicts, or regulations are rotten at the core, and therefore, contemptuous
of our First Freedom. Furthermore, I hold that the enforcement of said
judgments, verdicts, or regulations is repressive by their nature, being a flagrant
abuse of the coercive power of the state to undermine the freedom of We, the
People.
That’s where I stand, my brethren. Our duty is fight this
repression with all legitimate tools at our disposal and reverse the sorry
course our courts and branches of government have been charting during the last
50 years, a court that has veered us away from liberty and toward the
intellectual and moral subjugation of the many by the few.
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