American Civil Rights Union fellow Robert Knight has a column in the Washington Times today blasting President Obama and the American Civil Liberties Union for acting like Soviet commissar trying to extinguish religious liberty. Knight cites an upcoming Supreme Court case surrounding the town of Greece, New York, in which two non-Christian residents sued the town for exclusively inviting Christian pastors to open council meetings in prayer. The residents claimed that the town violated the establishment clause and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
But that is an interesting case for Knight to pick as proof that Obama is undermining the freedom of religion, since the Obama administration actually sided with the town of Greece.
Ever feel like an “outsider?”
If you have, then you have license to stamp out any public activity that you find religiously offensive.
That’s the claim advanced by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other groups that have taken a chain saw to the First Amendment. They intend to establish secularist sentiment as the only acceptable public expression.
Like the Soviet Union’s commissars and President Obama, they support “the freedom to worship,” a cramped view of religious freedom that protects essentially nothing. You can do what you want behind closed doors or inside your head. God help you, though, if you want to have an active faith and exercise your constitutional freedom outside those doors. Since before America’s founding, public meetings have opened with prayer. Usually, atheists or people of other faiths who find the mostly Christian prayers meaningless shrug and get on with business.
Increasingly, professional pests like the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State are using lawsuits to stamp out freedom of religion.
A key case at the U.S. Supreme Court may help sort things out. In Town of Greece v. Galloway, the town council of the upstate New York town contends that prayers before meetings do not violate the Establishment Clause. They note that George Washington prayed in public and that Congress opens with prayer.
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No, the unraveling of a civilization takes time, even when it’s proceeding at blinding speed, aided by government coercion.
