Posted on 04/15/2005 4:56:59 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Chief Justice Roy Moore’s new book So Help Me God is a captivating and unflinching first-hand account of a man on the front lines of the battle between religious freedom and judicial tyranny. This Alabama Supreme Court Justice embodies the true definition of patriotism, inasmuch he has risked his career and reputation to stand by his oath of office and refuses to deny his allegiance to the Constitution and the laws of nature and nature’s God for the mere sake of catering to the frenetic, deep-seated anti-religious paranoia of the uber-secular left.
It was on June 9, 1993 that ACLU member Joel Sogol wrote to then-chief justice of Alabama Sonny Hornsby, threatening to sue anyone who continued the time-honored tradition of praying in court. After Roy Moore took office in 1994 and refused to bring a halt to the tradition, the ACLU stepped up their threats of suit over the prayer and, in addition, began hyperventilating over the Ten Commandments plaque Justice Moore had placed in his courtroom. At the beginning of the third month of Justice Moore’s first term of office on March 31, 1995, the ACLU filed suit in U.S. district court against him on the basis that he had illegally imposed his religious beliefs on others in the courtroom, denouncing the prayer as “a religious test.”
The ACLU apparently didn’t feel up to suing all 550 members of Congress and all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who have always begun their daily proceedings with prayers. It may even be a sobering revelation to them that our very first president noted in his inaugural address, “no people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.” Nevertheless, it is doubtful that such words would bear much significance to a pathetic, subversive gang of rogue lawyers who have nothing better to do with their time than to bully public officials out of acknowledging their creator and to throw childish temper tantrums over harmless little plaques.
In a priceless act of civil disobedience, Justice Moore erected a 2½-ton granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the State Judicial Building. Moore would later write in his book that “[t]he display of God’s law was not done to make any bold statement, to intimidate or offend anyone, or to push any particular religion. It was simply a reminder that this country was established on a particular God and His divine, revealed laws; it reflected the Christian faith of our founders.”
Flabbergasted, on Halloween 2001, the ACLU ganged up with Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Southern Poverty Law Center to file suit over the monument. Demonstrating what loving people liberals can be, in a letter to the legal director of Americans United, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to Justice Moore as a “religious nut in partnership with a fanatical church.” (And showing how smart liberals can be, the letter was accidentally sent to Justice Moore’s attorney, Steve Melchior. Whoops!)
The case was set for trial on October 15, 2002. Less than a month after it ended, on November 18, 2002, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled against the Ten Commandments display, declaring it unconstitutional. In his ruling, Judge Myron stated: “[W]hile the Chief Justice is free to keep whatever religious beliefs he chooses, the state may not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Judeo-Christian God and attribute to that God our religious freedom.” Perhaps Judge Myron would be compelled to rethink his words if he actually bothered to read the Alabama State Constitution which Moore had sworn specifically to uphold, inasmuch as it reads in the preamble: “We, the people of the State of Alabama, in order to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish the following Constitution and form of government for the State of Alabama” (emphasis added).
On March 2, 2005, the New York Times expressed its disapproval of similar displays in between the Capitol and the State Supreme Court in Texas, and in county courthouses in Kentucky, accusing the displays’ backers of not accepting the “separation of church and state” while explaining that “[t]he Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making laws respecting an establishment of a religion.” If nothing else, at least these circumstances have given liberals yet another excuse to evince their maniacal infatuation with the “separation of church and state,” a phrase which we are supposed to believe is somewhere in the Constitution.
If a liberal sneezed and you said “God bless you” he would begin spastically whining about the “separation of church and state.” To appreciate this situation from the perspective of the judicial supremacists, the ACLU lawyers and the New York Times editors, we will just have to pretend for a moment that a) the “separation of church and state” exists in the Constitution, b) Congress is somehow responsible for the placement of the Ten Commandments monuments, and c) the monuments in effect represent an establishment of a state religion.
There. Now it sort of makes sense.
To the contrary, however, the left’s beloved “separation of church and state” mantra originated not in the Constitution, but in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 (11 years after the First Amendment was incorporated into the Constitution) regarding their concerns that the Congregationalists may abuse their power to attain a favored position. Explicitly, Jefferson wrote: “[the] wall of separation between church and state…is a one-directional wall. It keeps the government from running the church, but makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.”
The self-styled progressive elites have typically justified their anti-Christian bigotry by insinuating that religion must stay away from government, and any case in which it does not is an irrevocable step towards theocracy. Their interpretation of the language of the First Amendment demonstrates how little understanding they have of its actual implications.
By including the establishment clause in the Constitution, the framers were preventing the prospects of theocracy such as that which the Pilgrims purportedly fled from in England before settling on the North American shores. However, there is a reason why Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (emphasis added). What Jefferson was taking into account was the imperative necessity of our leaders and authorities to recognize their inferiority to the divine laws of the solar system and their subordinance to a Higher Power, so as not to confuse themselves with that Higher Power and in due course assume a despotic, tyrannical precedence.
The functionality of our democracy is contingent upon the Hobbesian doctrine that man is inherently corrupt and therefore in need of some degree of governmental supervision. The notion of human fallibility is quintessential of the Judeo-Christian doctrines with which our founders specifically harmonized their vision of a free republic. The acknowledgement of that fallible nature is what distinguishes our system from communism – a system which presupposes that man is basically good, and therefore capable of upholding and preserving a utopian, Edinic society. It distinguishes our system as well from that of monarchism and fascism, both of which presuppose that there is such a thing as Divine Right, or human infallibility; that it is possible for a human leader to take on a godlike authority over his people and govern them in a flawless manner. But because our system recognizes that there is no such thing as human infallibility, our branches of power are balanced, and our leaders are appointed through a democratic process by which the majority of citizens decide who gets to represent them, and for how long.
Secularist liberals tend to accuse Christians of seeing things too much in “black and white,” yet they themselves have adopted a black and white perspective by declining to consider the fact that not everything boils down to the two options of theocracy and secularism. A system of government that is religious in nature does not automatically take on the form of theocracy. It does not mean that its subjects must be coerced into submission to a certain designated religious faith. Whether or not we as individuals decide to subject ourselves to personal dependence on religion, we must recognize that our freedom to do so or not do so at our own will is dependent on our democratic system, and our democratic system is dependent on religion.
It is on account of this brand of narcissistic judicial hubris, this denial of subordinance to a Higher Law that an innocent woman was allowed to be inhumanly starved to death recently, that activist judges have been able to recklessly redefine the institution of marriage, and that an unremitting fetal holocaust has been sanctioned by the highest levels of government for 32 years and counting. The more we forget that we are “one nation under God,” the more we will become “one nation under the State.” If this becomes the case, then our rights will become conditional and susceptible to abuse, rather than God-given and immune to meddling. As many could argue, resting our rights solely on the state is like building a house on sand. (Note to liberals: Please pardon the biblical reference.)
Thanks for pointing that out.
So you would claim that the rights to be protected by our form of government are derived from it?
The constitution is not either a humanist or a religionist document. It leaves the motivation to respect it up to citizens.
No. The question of how we came to possess our free will as human beings is beyond the scope of the American system of government to answer.
A government is not it's symbols, nor is it it's writings or dogma. A government is not it's leaders. It is not it's land or buildings. A government is not it's rituals. If it is none of those things, what is it?
A church (religion) is not it's symbols, nor is it it's writings or dogma. A church is not it's leaders. It is not it's land or buildings. A church is not it's rituals. If it is none of these things, what is it? Here's a hint, what is it made up of?
A citizen who is an elected official is not free to use the power of the state in ways that over-specify the religious sentiments of the people. No group of people can fairly express the religious views of any one person. This is not a matter to be settled by democratic vote, nor can an official just because he is also a citizen, go beyond his authority in the capacity of his office. This is about limiting government power, not empowering citizens who happen to hold office.
Go back & try to answer my questions.
I answered your questions in my reply: despite the fact that citizens are members of government, they still do not have the authority to override limits on government power in their capacity as government officials. You and I certainly disagree about the role of the state with respect to religious expression. I think we've covered the main elements of our disagreement pretty well now. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
You just stated a very Judeo-Christian understanding of God. I am what I am!
You didn't anwer my questions. You wandered off to a tangent about government powers & it's limits from your POV. Dig into the philosophical understanding of my questions.
Are you asking if I believe in absolute morality?
No, I was trying to ask what I thought was an utterly simple question about whether you think the human 'moral sense' requires an external authority. But I'm not getting it across, so never mind. (And don't read more into the question that I put there.)
First of all, you have a logical fallacy here. You are pretending that citizens cannot believe in 'rights' being given by God and not by man, while still defining what is and is not a right. They can hold that rights are given by God and not by man, (which is what they believed), while still voting in accordance to their individual conscience which is informed by their own view of God. The conservative argument believes this, it is great to have a great man like Patrick Henry agree with our positition and also not think everything was a right, which is also our position.
The problem you are having is that you fail to see that there are many things that the founders did not intend to be forced upon us as a right. They left it up to the citizens to vote responsibly because they are responsible and free moral agents.
You have made it clear that you want the SCOTUS to ignore the intent expressed in each ratifying state population vote (ultimatley majorities do matter) and instead arbitrarily redefine what is right and wrong in spite of clear legal history and precedent.
You favor an oligarchy that has destroyed our constitutional republic of law.
Do you believe there is any absolute morality? I don't, therefore there is not one for me. I may have morals, but they are of my choosing and can be a reflection of my evolutionary state. We all evolve differently, maybe not by much but none of us are on the exact same plane. We all have a different morality.
You've so grossly misinterpreted what I've said that it's really pointless to reply to this post except to say one more thing. You say: You favor an oligarchy that has destroyed our constitutional republic of law.
And you'd replace one oligarchy for another, one in which the state has the authority to express the beliefs of its people, or at least one in which no one will be able to question official pageantry as long as it is Christian. Even if you don't think that's what you're doing, it is. I on the other hand, would like to take this problem a step forward, beyond the oligarchs on the left and beyond the oligarchs on the right.
If in trying to save the country, you refuse to admit that both camps could have oligarchs, you've already put yourself into a situation where corruption of our founding ideals has begun. By refusing to do so, you place yourself in the right's oligarchy merely in doing so.
If you could recognize that there is a way to move around the two obstacles presented to us and form a more perfect response, then we'd have something further to discuss on this thread.
I hit my send to early. I want to play the devils advocate on this morality thing. I want you to respond to my last post as if I am a died in the wool atheist. I am interested in your answer.
What you are saying is that the entire history of the United States before the (not exact) Warren Court was an oligarchy. The conservatives just want the constitution to be followed as intended, just like it was for the most part before 1947.
If that was an oligarchy, they sure did not think so.
Do you recognize that threats to our freedom could emerge from a reaction to this perceived oligarchy?
We disagree very much on these mattters, but I always appreciate honestry.
I'm out.
Gotta go, be back tomorrow.
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