Posted on 03/29/2006 1:04:29 PM PST by Crackingham
The "War on Christmas" has morphed into a "War on Christians."
Last December, some evangelical Christian groups declared that the religious celebration of Christmas -- and even the phrase "Merry Christmas" -- was under attack by the forces of secularism. This week, radio commentator Rick Scarborough convened a conference in Washington on the "War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006." The opening session was devoted to "reports from the frontlines" on "persecution" of Christians in the United States and Canada, including an artist whose paintings were barred from a municipal art show in Deltona, Fla., because they contained religious themes.
Among the conference's speakers were former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and conservative Christian leaders Phyllis Schlafly, Rod Parsley, Gary Bauer, Janet Parshall and Alan Keyes.
To many of the 400 evangelicals packed into a small ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, it was a hard but necessary look at moral relativism, hedonism and Christophobia, or fear of Christ, to pick just a few terms offered by various speakers referring to the enemy. To some outsiders, it illuminated the paranoia of the Christian right.
"Certainly religious persecution existed in our history, but to claim that these examples amount to religious persecution disrespects the experiences of people who have been jailed and died because of their faith," said Hollyn Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
"This is a skirmish over religious pluralism, and the inclination to see it as a war against Christianity strikes me as a spoiled-brat response by Christians who have always enjoyed the privileges of a majority position," said the Rev. Robert Franklin, a minister in the Church of God in Christ and professor of social ethics at Emory University.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
That is a 100% true story. You can ask our sons who remember it like it was yesterday.
Life-size males. Anatomically correct. Nude. White plaster. Upside-down. Hung by their genitals. In the front floor-to-ceiling gallery window on the main street in town.
It was "art" created by some lesbian and sanctioned by the city council who thought it was an appropriate response to "male aggression."
What the dimwits hadn't counted on was the "aggression" of parents who expected to be able to walk down the street without scaring their kids silly.
Where do you live, Greenwich village? South Beach? West LA?
Far from Baltimore. But my point is that what once was unthinkable is spreading fast.
Insurance for co-habitating couples was once ridiculed. Now it's the norm from State Farm to Disney.
Gay adoption was illegal and considered child abuse. Now it's everywhere.
Our town used to put up Christmas decorations. Now it displays blue dolphins and Celebration Trees in December.
Every step in the wrong direction leads us downhill faster.
I can see your point.
Now, now, now. People are going to the barricades in Paris as we speak to defend the right to keep your paycheck without doing your job. ;-)
The radical left consistently takes their constructs to extremes. Neither the Constitution nor the 14th Amendment would have been ratified if the public had know that 20th century loony left judges would warp them into such contortions. Socialism cannot compete with God. Therefore, God must go.
Christianity saves lives, socialism has murdered many tens of millions.
Irrelevant. State's weren't covered by the First Amendment until the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights and applied them to the States.
Christianity saves lives, socialism has murdered many tens of millions.
False dichotomy - at best, this is a sloppy use of the term "socialism." Saying that the government has no business promoting - or hindering - any religion (with, of course the obvious exceptions that human sacrifice, for instance, is illegal regardless of your religious beliefs) is not automatically "socialism," which has a discrete meaning (specifically, an economic system where the government plans and controls the economy, but does not command it).
Stop knee-jerking, and read a Constitutional law textbook written for law students. You can buy a used one off Amazon for $50.00. You might have your assumptions blown out of the water.
No, you stop jerking. The law does not belong to your druid blackrobes. Read Levin's "Mean in Black", and get back to me.
I did. I then passed it along to my more conservative mother for her to read. I was unimpressed. It was written for people who haven't extensively read Constitutional Law.
The law does not belong to your druid blackrobes.
The Constitution vests in the Supreme Court all cases arising out of Federal Law and under the Constitution (Art. III, Section 1). Someone has to determine what vague words like "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" means. Someone has to call an end to the contraversy. The Constitution vests that in the Courts. That's the fundamental flaw in Levin's argument - he doesn't like the Supreme Court's rulings, so he tries to argue judicial review isn't Constitutional. The argument is quite fallacious - which is why not even Scalia agrees with this position. (If he did, he would refuse to review a whole heck of a lot more cases than he does.)
Constitutional law textbook? No thanks. I prefer for instance Page Smith's, The Constitution, a Documentary and Narrative History, 1980. I think what the founders and their times had to say more pertinent than subsequent lawyers. But then again, I am not a snot nosed law student whose life purpose is to promote social justice.
Do you believe our rights come from God?
I didn't say the 14th did repeal the First. I said it applied it to the States.
I think what the founders and their times had to say more pertinent than subsequent lawyers.
The Founders weren't around when the 14th Amendment - which was a sea change in Constitutional law - was ratified. Thus, a lot of their viewpoints are irrelevant. Furthermore,
"I willingly acquiesce in the institutions of my country, perfect or imperfect, and think it a duty to leave their modifications to those who are to live under them and are to participate of the good or evil they may produce. The present generation has the same right of self-government which the past one has exercised for itself."
-- Thomas Jefferson to John Hampden Pleasants, 1824. ME 16:29
But then again, I am not a snot nosed law student whose life purpose is to promote social justice.
There are worse missions in life - but I have said nothing that is not amply demonstrated in Constitutional law. I have said nothing that is not echoed by every mainstream Constitutional law professor.
What I believe is irrelevant. What the law says is what matters.
Damn straight. I can pray all I want, and I can shout prayers to the Evil Dark Lord Xenu from a soap box on the street corner, and the State can't do squat to stop me. But the state - or its agents - can't make me pray or endorse a prayer. That's as it should be.
SCOTUS decreed that anal sex is a right.
Do you want the kind of intrusive government that would be enforcing such rules? Should the government be snooping in people's bedrooms? What consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes - even if it is immoral - is none of the State's business.
O'Conner thinks we should accept such abominations quietly. I do not.
She does not say that you have to accept them quietly, but that you have to accept them respectfully. There's a critical difference. Calling for the deaths of the justices was what she criticized as a threat to judicial independance.
Hey Farva, what's the name of that restaurant you like with all the goofy stuff on the wall and the mozzarella sticks?
Sloppy might be an adequate description. In any case, though, socialism is best known by examples of socialism. They fit on a continuum from more to less command control.
National socialism (nazi) might be on one end of that continuum and democratic socialism might be on the other. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were a type of socialism known as communism. It, too, has its different examples, but one could have a lively discussion regarding its placement relative to National Socialism. Would it be more or less directive?
Since we're nitpicking here, the commandment does not say to worship just one god, but to have no other gods "before me". Not "but"; "before". "Before" indicates who's first. "But" would be exclusive.
The simple fact remains, the Constituional delegates were heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian religion and they never denied it. You want to mince words and claim that if a given commandment doesn't have a specific part of the Constitution devoted to it, then there is no connection whatsoever. The delegates did come from various denominations, which was why they feared the establishment of a single, national, church like the Church of England. This precaution has been mutated into the "separation of church and state" of today.
That phrase is just as absent from the Constitution as the "Thou shalt nots" you wish to invalidate, so by your reasoning, if they are invalid, so is it.
Hardly irrelevant. Just another example of long chrerished traditions flushed away at the whim of the blackrobes.
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