Posted on 11/15/2005 3:47:04 PM PST by Stepan12
Abraham Foxman has gone from nuisance to embarrassment to self-parody.
The national leader of the Anti-Defamation League has declared war on conservative Christians. In doing so, he's not only attacking the best friends Israel and the Jewish people have, he's also repudiating Torah-based morality.
At a New York meeting of the ADL's national leadership recently, Foxman experienced a near total meltdown. Groups like Focus on The Family and American Family Association are leading a full-scale assault on tolerance and diversity, Foxman foamed.
As reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Foxman declared: "Today we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!"
Foxman went on to explain that the ominous agenda of the Christianizers includes working to confirm conservative judicial nominees, restricting abortion and stopping gay marriage.
"They intend to Christianize all aspects of American life, from the halls of government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording studios, to the playing fields and locker rooms of professional, collegiate and amateur sports; from the military to SpongeBob SquarePants," the ADL chief warned. Is Sponge Pants Jewish? Has he been slated for forced baptism?
Perhaps Foxman could turn his conspiracy theory into a documentary for cable television - "Christians Gone Wild."
And how, exactly, are James Dobson, Don Wildmon and their colleagues going to accomplish their Christianizing mission?
Is keeping "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance Christianizing America? Is maintaining the traditional definition of marriage (you know, the one found in that Jewish book, Genesis) Christianizing America? Is public display of The Ten Commandments Christianizing America? In Hebrew school, they forgot to tell me that Moses was a Christianizer.
For the most part, conservative Christians are defending the status quo. Except in Massachusetts, where radical change was mandated by the judiciary, marriage as the union of a man and a woman is the norm. Foxman is arguing that self-defense, by the likes of the Alliance Defense Fund and Arlington Group, constitutes a proselytizing campaign.
Thus, according to Foxman, whenever the left tries to force a supremely dumb and dangerous social experiment on the nation, and Christian conservatives resist, the latter are engaged in a holy war designed to save or suppress the infidels.
Regarding so-called church-state issues, here religious conservatives do indeed want to turn back the clock - to an era before the federal courts began reading their secularist dogma into the First Amendment, to a time when "establishment of religion" meant just that - no national church - as opposed to today, when (according to the 9th Circuit Appeals Court) it means an acknowledgement of the God in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Imagine the chutzpah of those notorious Christianizers -- Jefferson and Adams -- making God the focal point of The Declaration of Independence. ("That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights .... That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.") For the Founding Fathers (those Christian zealots), God was the basis for self-government.
Foxman is furious because he detests the political agenda of Christian conservatives, and sees them making headway. That is his right - just as it's the right of Dobson and company to do what their opponents on the left (the ACLU, People for the American Way, MoveOn.org, etc) are doing to the best of their ability - using the political process to advance their cause.
This is neither sinister, conspiratorial nor coercive. It's called democracy.
The last time Foxman lost it was when Reverend Jerry Falwell distributed bumper stickers that proclaimed: "I Vote Christian." ("Directly at odds with the American ideal, and should be rejected," the ADL-ayatollah fumed.)
The poster boy for militant secularism never explained why it's legitimate for environmentalists to vote for environmental issues, for feminists to try to legislate the values of feminism, for Democrats to be guided by redistributionism, but ominous and intimidating for Christians to base their political choices on Christian values.
If there is a crusade here, it's Foxman and friends who are unfurling the banners. The ADL has been transformed from an organization working to combat anti-Semitism to just another leftist group bent on severing America from its religious roots.
For instance, in June, the ADL National Director wrote to the superintendent of the United States Naval Academy demanding an end to the practice of grace being offered before midshipmen take their lunch.
These are voluntary prayers, led on a rotating basis by one of the academy's Protestant, Catholic or Jewish chaplains. (Foxman called the invocations "coercive" and a violation of church-state separation.) If resistance to this demand reflects a desire to Christianize America, put me down as a Christianizer.
Where does Foxman think these Christianizers got their morality from anyway -- "The 700 Club," Dobson's daily broadcasts or the curriculum of Liberty University?
What's called Judeo-Christian morality comes from the Jewish Bible, as transmitted to the West by Christianity. It's the Torah that says "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination." The Torah tells us God commanded man to leave his father and his mother and "cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." (Anita Bryant used to famously quip that "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.")
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late leader of the world's largest Hasidic group, once expressed his support for a nondenominational school prayer by rhetorically asking what harm it did for students to begin the school day by affirming the existence of One to whom they are answerable?
The Alliance for Marriage, a group pushing a Federal Marriage Amendment, numbers among its advisors Rabbi Yoels Schonfeld of the Queens Board of Rabbis, Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition and Barry Freundel, rabbi of Kesher Israel, the most prominent Orthodox synagogue in our nation's capital.
On its website, Agudath Israel, lobbying arm of yeshiva Orthodoxy, reports that it "has urged the Supreme Court to reconsider its holdings in Roe v. Wade, and supports legislation that restricts abortion on demand." Agudath takes its marching orders not from Colorado Springs (headquarters of Focus on The Family) but from Sinai.
While there are plenty of organizations with the word Jewish in their titles on the other side, as commentator and Jewish scholar Dennis Prager notes, the more a Jew understands Jewish law and is committed to Torah values, the more apt he is to support social conservative positions. In other words, the more likely he is to find himself politically aligned with those Foxman calls Christianizers. Perhaps one should speak of Judeo-Christianizers.
While synagogues are attacked by Muslim rioters in France and Jewish students are harassed and assaulted on our college campuses, while Israel is slandered by vocal leftists like Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan (who says the Iraq War was a Neo-Con conspiracy to aid Israel), Abe Foxman has located the real threat to Jews in a group of church ladies who want to erect a Nativity scene in the public park at Christmas.
There's no nation on earth where Jews have been more welcomed - no nation that has made a greater contribution to the survival of the Jewish people - than America.
It's no coincidence that America is also the only nation since ancient Israel specifically founded on a Biblical worldview. Does Foxman imagine that Jews will be safer in a secular America (one cut off from its spiritual roots)? Are the Jews of Europe safer on a continent that can't even acknowledge its Christian heritage?
Would Foxman feel safer walking the streets of Biloxi, Mississippi or one of those towns around Paris illuminated by the glow of burning Citroens? Previously published on GrassTopeUSA.com
Thank you for staying largely true to them, and for fighting to spread and protect them in the face of overwhelming opposition. And thanks for remembering us. ;)
And thanks be to G-d for giving us the Laws and the Commandments, and the wisdom of the Good Book.
And for America.
Amen!
Could not agree more. However, I think that this success is more a product of the ideals and ethics of Christianity, and Judaism, than a specific religion.
If the founding fathers had wanted this nation to be 'Christian' they would have had no trouble at the beginning making it so. The vast majority of people in the colonies were Christian and they could have easily excluded all other religions, which as learned men of the time the founding fathers were well aware of.
At the time of the founding there were many examples of 'Christian' nations in the world, England being one, but the founders chose a different course. One that had never been attempted, one that recognized the rights of man to choose his own life path and religion.
From the Declaration of Independence:
"...to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,..."
"...that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
"...with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,..."
This country was founded by Christians! It was founded based on the premise that only God can grant freedom. All man can do is deny freedom.
Do Atheists celebrate Thanksgiving? If so, exactly who do they give thanks to? Each other?
Do people really believe that the universe is just one big cosmic accident? If there is no God, no right or wrong, no judgment waiting for us on the other side, what point is there to set down any laws? On whose authority? Let's just go over to straight anarchy and be done with it.
Would someone please enlighten me as to what Jesus said or did that's got so many people peeved at him? 2000 years have passed and some people are still trying to kill him!
Said it before and I'll say it again: The Viagra people could solve most of the world's problems if they just invent a pill that gives people that permanent sex-high they're all looking for. I really don't think that sex was intended for use as a recreational drug. The pharmaceutical companies could possibly solve this problem.
Answer, it doesn't. Belief in God does not make one a Christian.
Try again.
I don't think anyone could put it much better than you did just now. And most definitely, I agree it is the ideals and ethics of Christianity and Judaism than a specific religion. However, I am a firm believer in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". And if it's broke, admit there's a problem and call in a trusted handyman.
I think we need to fight to maintain the culture. And above all, stay true to the Constitution. But that also means staying true to the vision the founders adhered to. I don't think they envisioned a land without religion, just one in which the state did not interefere in private matters. As you said, though, if they wanted it to be a purely Christian nation, it could easily have been so. It is a testament to their virtue and commitment to the majestic ideals of America's founding that they didn't.
I don't want a theocracy. But I don't think that's really a viable option. ;) I don't even want to legislate morality (unless its in the best interests of the nation and does not infringe upon individual rights too much). Re-asserting Judeo-Christian ethics and values and ideals into America? That is, and I feel that's something we've lost over the last 40 years. And that we need to get back, if we want to see America strong and proud and free again as it once was, and could easily be again.
I'm not Christian and I believe in G-d. The same G-d you do. Many of the founding fathers were deists. And most were at least partially influenced by deist thought, which was prominent and popular at the time in salon discussions and the like.
The point wasn't that America was created to be without G-d, but without a state religion (like, say England and Anglicanism, or France and the Catholic Church). Anyone could come and worship as they pleased, in peace, so long as they were willing to live by and defend American rights and values.
"Wussies.
I drink Pepsi anyway, I can't stand Coke.
Is it time for a meaningless boycott alert? :)"
I'd be closer to boycotting polar bears than Coke... :)
There are entire cities I avoid because of the difficulties getting real Coke and Diet Coke.
As I Christian myself, specifically a Catholic, I believe in the Holy Trinity. That the path to God goes through Jesus, with assistance from the Holy Spirit. I'm not aware of anything Jesus said or did that deviates from God the father.
This redefinition of 'separation of Church and State' has me very frightened. Freedom of religion is systematically being re-interpreted as freedom from religion. I wonder if, in the future, the God-haters will be so bold as to tell me how to pray? Will I be prevented from pursuing public office or even employment because I choose to follow a religion?
http://www.noapathy.org/tracts/mythofseparation.html
Why do you put a hyphen between the 'g' and the 'd'?
I believe, as you, that America should not be without God. My fear is that the most ardent supporters of this redefined 'separation of church and state' are out to do just that.
Such a fool you are. I do not bow to my own form of religion. Why should anyone else?
As to speaking for God. He can do that better for Himself. Pity you are not listening. You might begin to understand the truth about our Constitution and Christianity at its core.
It is not religion that is at stake. It is God.
Jewish cultural thing; I'd say most Jews don't do it, but a few do. A couple of the other Jewish FReepers do as well. It's so I avoid writing a name of G-d, to avoid the sin of erasing or defacing the Name (blasphemy) as the Name itself is held to be sacred. Hebrew school taught me to do it when I was young, and though I drifted away from religion for a long while (a long while being relative as I'm only 21 now), I drifted back and I guess I kinda just picked up a few of my old habits.
And yes, I think your fear is a very reasonable one. I do think its mainly the most ardent supporters of what you rightly term a redefinition, but they are enough of a problem. It's something we need to worry about, but not panic about. Just teach your children to love G-d, and to love His Laws and commandments. Teach them to be good people and good Americans, and you will have done your part. Although there's always more to do, if you're feeling up to it. ;)
Read 11Bush's latest post. I think it sums up a very reasonable perspective. ;)
Nice post, though. And it's unfortunate so many people have tried to push G-d from their lives. I think it goes to the root of many problems of our society.
Read 11Bush's latest post. I think it sums up a very reasonable perspective. ;)
Nice post, though. And it's unfortunate so many people have tried to push G-d from their lives. I think it goes to the root of many problems of our society.
I just 'Googled' the word 'deist' and found this definition: Deist is defined in Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1941, as: "One who believes in the existence of a God or supreme being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason."
http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm
I will say that Deism does have it's advantages. After all, those pesky 'revealed religions' have so many silly rules like: 'Thou shalt not commit adultery' - or - 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods.' I take it that, as a Deist, a person simply acknowledges the existence of God and that's it. A person gives prayers of thanks and appreciation and does not dictate to God. (I have no quarrel with that part) But it seems to me that God isn't very well defined here, meaning God can not dictate to people either. Individuals can define God any way they want to. No rules, no sin. Quite convenient actually.
It's been fun folks, but I'm late for bed. Good night.
Apparently neither of my two links in posts 71 and 77 worked right. Sorry folks. My knowledge of HTML is very limited.
I'll try it again:
http://www.noapathy.org/tracts/mythofseparation.html
http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm
Am I against the ACLU, the government, and NGOs from deciding religious questions? Hell yes! Do I think that this country needs to find it's religious bearing? Hell yes! Do I think that you, or any other religion, should be the only one? HELL NO!
As to God being at stake, He will Be long after man has faded from the universe.
Then we have no disagreement. Good.
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