Posted on 12/08/2003 5:41:54 AM PST by SJackson
In a recent article in The American Prospect, the former Labor Secretary sees a nation teeming with fascist religious Evangelicals. And Catholics. And Jews . . . .
Former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich has declared war on evangelical Christians. At least we can be grateful for his candor.
For years the liberal-left and its minions in the media and judiciary have waged a relentless -- albeit a covert -- offensive against Judeo-Christian values and done everything short of homicide to drive religious expression from the public square. Reich makes explicit what has for some time been the stealth strategy of progressive politics.
Writing in the liberal periodical The American Prospect (“The Religious Wars”) on December 1, Reich starts the season of good will toward men on a benevolent note. Since the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas (overturning the anti-sodomy laws of 14 states), “evangelicals have grown louder” in their demands to legislate their morality, Reich cautions.
Said Testament-thumpers intend to make the Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court ruling (in effect mandating gay marriage) “a major issue during the upcoming presidential campaign.” The “ground troops of the Republican Party” were “emboldened” by their victory with the ban on partial-birth abortion. Now, evangelicals are “mounting an all-out offensive” for judicial nominees like Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, who is most disrespectful of Roe v. Wade, and (oh horror of horrors!) “they’re determined to put religion back into the public schools.”
Can nothing be done to stop these fundamentalist fanatics?!
Reich argues that America’s only hope to defeat the coming theocracy is a Democratic Party willing to stand up to the zealots. “Democrats should call all this for what it is – a clear and present danger to religious liberty in America,” Reich writes. “For more than 300 years, the liberal tradition has sought to free people from the tyranny of religious doctrines that would otherwise be imposed on them. Today’s evangelical right detests that tradition and seeks nothing short of a state-sponsored religion. But maintaining the separation of church and state is a necessary precondition of liberty.”
But which religion do evangelicals want the state to sponsor? Evangelical Protestants (a generic term) are divided into dozens of denominations. Alan Keyes and William Bennett, icons of the religious right, are Roman Catholics. The U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference entirely agrees with evangelicals on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.
Then there are Jewish talk show hosts like Dennis Prager and Michael Medved, who see eye to eye with evangelicals on the above issues, as well judicial nominations and school prayer. Perhaps Judaism will also receive state-sponsorship in the coming regime.
In reality, what many of us – including this Jew – seek is an America true to the vision of the Founding Fathers, what’s loosely called the Judeo-Christian tradition. Sorry, Bob, but that’s not synonymous with an “establishment of religion” prohibited by the First Amendment. If it was, the Founders would have had themselves arrested. (Washington, Adams, Madison and, yes, even Jefferson believed in public acknowledgement of religious principals, but not in public support for a specific church.) The first official act of the first Congress was to hire a chaplain.
Liberals like Reich are engaged in monumental historical revisionism. The ex-Clintonista seems to be saying that regulations on abortion, a non-denominational prayer (or a moment of silent meditation) and limiting marriage to a man and a woman constitute state-sponsored religion. If so, America was a theocracy as recently as 1962.
Abortion was then illegal throughout the United States. I grew up saying the New York state Regent’s prayer. Not even Lenny Bruce imagined that there would one day be a judicial drive to turn marriage into a free-form institution.
Did we have a state-sponsored religion 40 years ago? Were we all forced to pay taxes for the support of one denomination? Was there a religious test for public office? Who was the Archbishop of the United States? Even to ask these questions is to highlight the absurdity of Reich’s thesis.
However, the ex-Cabinet officer, now a Brandeis professor, is correct in one regard: A religious/culture war is being waged in this country. It’s been going on for roughly four decades, though its pace is accelerating. It’s a war on all who adhere to Biblical morality regardless of where they pray, a war to radically remake America – to turn it into a nation hostile to traditional religion and a Judeo-Christian worldview – and a war to establish liberalism as our official, state-sponsored creed.
What are the tenets of this secular dogma? That human life isn’t God-given, hence expendable (ergo, that the unborn child can be destroyed and brain-damaged patients starved to death). That morality should be based on societal whims, shaped by popular culture, instead of on eternal standards. That every philosophy (communism, environmentalism, feminism, sexual liberation, animal rights, anti-globalism) has its place in the political marketplace of ideas except that philosophy on which the nation was founded – an ethical perspective first enunciated at Sinai 3,300 years ago.
Perhaps Reich’s most absurd premise is that, on so-called church-state issues, “public opinion sides with the Democrats,” who will win next year via a frontal assault on evangelicals.
But if the public was on its side, the Left wouldn’t have needed the courts to mandate gay marriage – it would have been enacted by Congress or the state legislatures, or passed by popular referenda.
Like every other social revolution engineered over the past 40 years, (legalized abortion, turning our schools into religion-free zones and the abolition of public standards of decency), gay marriage came to us not courtesy of the people or their elected representatives but from the least democratic branch of government – one essentially insulated from public opinion – an imperial judiciary.
To cite but one example of public sentiments on what liberals like Reich would call the co-mingling of government and religion, in a Sept. 19-21, 2003, Gallup poll, 78 percent of the American people supported a non-denominational prayer in public schools, 70 favored display of The Ten Commandments in public buildings and 64 percent approved of federal funds for social programs conducted by Christian religious organizations.
One can only conclude that while Reich slept, the nation was overrun by cheerleaders for theocracy!
Religious liberty – freedom of conscience – is indeed “a necessary precondition of liberty.” So is an objective, eternal moral code, one grounded in a tradition stretching back millennia. John Adams acknowledged this, when he remarked: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Why should I believe that all men are created equal, unless I believe in a God who made them so? Why should I believe in human rights, if I do not believe in a God who gave man free will? (That quotation on the Liberty Bell, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” comes from the Hebrew Bible, not the ACLU’s charter or the Humanist Manifesto II.)
Demolish America’s religious foundation, and you destroy the basis for liberty, rights and representative government. Consider the fate of Russia and Germany when they turned to Godless isms. Both first dethroned God, then made hell on earth in the name of creating heaven on earth.
Like Robert Reich, the architect of the Third Reich understood the necessity of purging that Old Time Religion before his secular vision could be achieved.
Hitler reportedly told his friend Hermann Rauschning: “We are fighting the perversion of our healthiest instincts…That devilish: Thou shalt! Thou shalt! And that stupid: Thou shalt not…We commence hostilities against the so-called Ten Commandments; the tablets from Sinai are no longer in force. Conscience, like circumcision, is a mutilation of man.” (Quoted by Hannes Stein in, “Return of the Gods,” First Things, November, 1999).
Well, at least Der Fuhrer didn’t do it in the name of preserving liberty and religious pluralism.
Reich wants an intellectual battle over whether a Judeo-Christian or New Age pagan worldview will dominate our laws and institutions? I say: Bring it on!
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Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who's currently the host of a talk show on WTTT 1150Am in Boston, M-F, 6-9am.
You watch too much television. Evangelicals don't watch TV preachers and neither should you.
Like others of his ilk, rather than try and prevail in the various elected lawmaking bodies (where it cannot) he pursues it relentlessly in the Courts, where the Will Of The People is neither a consideration nor a deterrent.
I quit watching television about 12 or 14 years ago, for the most part, and I couldn't stand to watch the TV preachers when I did watch it. But I am interested that you don't consider TV preachers to be evangelical, that gives me a slightly better impression of them. What about Pat Robertson, for instance? I have seen his face on TV.
Interestingly, today's "liberals" and today's Democrats also detest that tradition.
"Until around 1830, well after the Constitution was written, both Massachusetts and Virginia required that tax money be used to support Christian churches, Baptists in Virgina and Congregationalists in Massachusetts."
My understanding is that the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment (I like that term much better than the "seperation of church and state" clause) still is not considered to apply to the states. Yet, IMO, the idea of citizens being taxed to subisidize religion flys in the very face of the ideals for which the USA, was founded, individual freedom, which includes freedom of religion.
Considering the ever increasing paternalism of our state, I cannot disagree, but having a state religion, as has often been done in the past in other places, would make the above even more likely.
That is the very fist thing I stated before commenting on the article, in my initial post. It is inarguable.
However, while the Judaeo Christian principles set forth in the Bible are the basis of our code of ethics, on which so many of our laws are based, they are not the basis of our principles of individual freedom and personal liberty. IMO, conflict between the 2 is not only not inevitable, the possibility should not be ignored.
I do think many on the religious right (and the religious left, too, even more so) are quite capable of intruding into our freedoms.
While you are laughing out loud at cook county's advice to me to stop watching so much TV (and bumping his erroneous advice with bold type), I guess you also did not read my reply to him that I, in fact, rarely watch television, and certainly not the preachers to be found on it. The witty rejoinder is off the mark. TV is mostly crap, you probably agree.
"Are we so “polite” to religious minorities that we're ashamed of our own heritage?"
Yes, but it's a hugh mistake on our part.
It's more up to the legislators, I think. It's up to the voters to pick the right legislators.
That's an interesting point, to which I don't have the answer. Now you got me thinking.
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