It’s Freedom OF Religion, Not Freedom FROM Religion
By Ann Huggett (09/02/03)
I was lucky enough to start in the high tech industry during the mid-90s before group think and sensitivity classes were forced on hapless workers. As more and more socialist insanity infiltrated the business arena poisoning the atmosphere between the sexes and polarizing everyone politically, people stopped talking to each other except for the most shallow of topics. Good conversations with the exchange of ideas were replaced with “Did ya see that outfit last night Sarah Jessica Parker wore on Sex and the City?”
So there I was, minding my own business when this UPS guy sauntered into my work cubicle to deliver a package. He was pleasant enough until he spotted my “Politically Incorrect and Proud of It” bumper sticker pinned over my bookshelf. Normally when people saw that sign they’d relax around me knowing they could speak freely and say what they really thought rather than turn themselves inside-out with verbal gymnastics so as not to offend someone’s fragile racial/sexual/cultural/physical/political over-inflated sense of self.
But not this guy. Oh, no! He suddenly was a man on a mission, a freshly minted socialist out of the government propaganda camps otherwise known as public schools, intent on saving me from the Forces of Darkness a.k.a. conservatism. Figuring I was probably also a Pat Robertson loving, watch the 700 Club, Bible thumping, abortion clinic bomber, the kid felt compelled to start off telling me all about the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Figuring that I hadn’t had a good laugh all day, I let him rattle on until he said those fatal words, “…And it says freedom from religion…” at which point I verbally let him have it right between his beady little eyes. To say that the kid was shocked to find out exactly what the First Amendment actually said and to find out where that fatal “separation of Church and State” comment came from is a total understatement.
So for all you mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, rhetoric-spouting, government-educated ignoramuses out there, the First Amendment to the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The “separation of Church and State” comes from a 1782 letter penned by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut assuring them that Congress had no intention of formally declaring Congregationalism as the national religion of America. In it Jefferson stated, “I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
Now, can anyone cite the exact law Congress passed to place the Ten Commandments outside of Judge Roy Moore’s Alabama Courthouse? If Congress put that 5,300-pound statue there, then it can be argued it’s unconstitutional although a specific Christian sect is not part of the monument. If it was put there, as it was, by personal installation to remind the public on that which our laws are based, then it is perfectly legitimate and constitutional.
Judge Roy Moore’s courageous refusal to remove it shows that he was upholding his sworn duty to protect and preserve the Constitution. That the Ten Commandment statue was eventually removed and his case refused by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals shows that something else is afoot. Frederick Bastiat best stated it in 1848 when he said, “But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect.
The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.”
Precisely why did I quote Bastiat? Because the perversion of law he was referring to was socialism. Two years before Engels and Marx codified and formalized socialism, Bastiat understood that socialism was the tool preferred by the unscrupulous to gain power and wealth through the labor of others. It not only granted government approval of organized theft but also demanded that no higher authority could be acknowledged to it. There is, however, a higher authority to the state and that is God on Whose laws our inalienable rights are established and depend. If you remove all acknowledgement of God from public discourse and teach generations of school children that religion is a thing to be avoided, then you successfully clear the deck of the only Rival the state has.
That is why liberal judicial activism in America twists and perverts our Constitution and laws. Through a deliberate misinterpretation of the Constitution, liberals seek to actively establish not only the glorification of the state but to establish the only religion they can endure: atheism.
Without a firm basis of moral law, amoral man can wreck havoc not only through removing restraints on behavior but codify any passion or whim that attracts the morally bankrupt. When men give way to their passions, they are ruled by them. At that point men become animals and the socialists know it is far easier to herd animals than it is to rule men.
We currently have tens of thousands of laws on the books but can the average person name them? Ignorance of the law is no excuse either. In Orwell’s 1984 it’s mentioned that the state cannot terrorize an innocent man; therefore it is the state’s duty to make everyone a criminal. The average person, however, can name each and every commandment. Obeying them will not only keep a person out of trouble in this world but in the next.
President John Quincy Adams understood this when he said, "The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal [code] as well as a moral and religious code. These are laws essential to the existence of men in society and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws. Vain indeed would be the search among the writings of [secular history] . . . to find so broad, so complete and so solid a basis of morality as this decalogue lays down."
In the coming months look to more and more attacks on any symbolism even vaguely associated with Christianity as liberal judicial activists seek to establish the state as the ultimate highest authority. Fallible, greedy men want to set their version of a heaven-soon-to-turn-hell into place as they ruthlessly and unconstitutionally ban the only laws that were ever truly set in stone: the Ten Commandments.
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