Impressive. I’ve a fifty-year acquaintance with Joe (believed by many to be one of the sharpest legal minds ever developed by this nation, and to have been a far better choice for Chief Justice than John Marshall, had not fate taken a different turn).
I fail to see how your extensive quotation from Commentaries on the Constitution has any relevance to the issues I’ve raised (save as supportive).
Are Kevmo and spirited Congress? Do you think that Kevmo and spirited should have something greater than their opinion behind the ideas they express?
Or, contrarily, do you believe Kevmo’s and spirited’s ideas so repugnant that you believe the Regime’s power should be used (presumably at your direction) to suppress them? Is it your opinion that some opinions are simply intolerable, and that your vote should be the deciding opinion decreeing which are?
Are Kevmo’s and spirited’s opinions more outside the boundary of Society than Phil Robertson’s? NAMBLA? The GLBT?
From your quotation of Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution re: Article VI: “They knew, that bigotry was unceasingly vigilant in its stratagems, to secure to itself an exclusive ascendancy over the human mind; and that intolerance was ever ready to arm itself with all the terrors of the civil power to exterminate those, who doubted its dogmas, or resisted its infallibility.”
Does not Joe’s observation more closely approximate a description of Liberals, Planned Parenthood, or either of the Regime’s two political parties than anything else?
The News and Activism forum is where issues of public policy and political activism are discussed. The Religion forum is explicitly for theological/religious issues. It also has different "rules of engagement" because it's been recognized and acknowleged that those discussions can quickly become emotional and personal and need to be kept in check.
I questioned why the article was posted in News and Activism, implicitly placing it in a political context, instead of Religion where it obviously belongs. I have not been the only person to ask that question and it has not been answered, but attacked as if it is not a fair question.
Within this context, in Free Republic, clearly Kevmo considers it his sacred duty to identify, condemn in the strongest possible language (i.e., "God Damned Heretic"), and suggest the removal of posters whose religious views don't necessarily match Kevmo's ideas of orthodoxy.
FRiends, I don't fully understand the "big picture" in this, but there appears maybe a great debate within Free Republic as to whether threads like this one of spirited irish belong in a highly restricted, closely moderated Religion Forum?
Or should it be "let loose" into the larger News/Activism world, where they will run into people as blunt-spoken, stubborn-minded, historically knowledgeable and unorthodox as, oh, say, for instance... yours truly, BroJoeK?
If you've read all of Kevmo's posts, you may have noticed several of them which seemed addressed not to us, but to somebody outside, "lurkers", on just this question.
It possibly was what motivated Kevmo to start up his own Religion Forum thread...?
Spirited irish also, at one point, seemed to be complaining about having been, in effect, banished from the Religion Forum and relegated to the indignities of News/Activism.
She even somehow blamed yours truly, BroJoeK for having caused this -- which I promise you is utterly impossible, since I never knowingly go into Religion threads: why would I ever want to go on a thread where everybody is howling like Kevmo?
Heaven forfend!
So, bottom line, here is the question on the table: in view of their overheated enthusiasm for rooting out "heretics" within the world of Free Republic, are we still certain that Kevmo and spirited irish are on-board with our Founding Fathers' ideals regarding religious freedom?
Or might they prefer a more religiously restricted political structure?
As an experiment, I went through some of this thread
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/3104329/posts?q=1&;page=251
and identified where posters were “making it personal” the way that Brojoke has been doing throughout this thread. The religion moderator removed ALL of those posts. Even the ones that seemed borderline. His hogwash would NOT be allowed on that thread, and that is why he do not go over there. I’m over there, a prime juicy target for him. But he prefers to stay over here where his trolling tactics and heresy are allowed. So if such tactics are allowed, for him, they’re allowed for me. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. And he has spent the better part of 20 posts complaining about how his arguments have been turned into goose sauce. He is simply a despicable heretic.