John Rossomando
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The push toward the institutionalization of homosexuality by the state amounts to a repudiation of the American Revolution’s accommodation between faith and public life because it requires millions of Americans to violate their consciences. Under the American Revolution, conscience reigned supreme and the government could not tell any American what to believe or what to think.
But the Roman Catholic acting archbishop of Denver James Conley warned according Lifesite:
“America today is becoming what I would call an atheocracy — a society that is actively hostile to religious faith and religious believers. And I might add — the faith that our society is most hostile toward is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular,” he said.
Conley noted that, because such an anti-faith movement has as its basis no solid ethical principles, it is a particularly dangerous force. “Hence, it has no foundation upon which to establish justice, secure true freedom, or to constrain tyrants,” said the bishop, who pointed to Roe v. Wade as the perfect example of how the amoral principle of “the violence of the strong against the weak” is allowed to triumph.
Freedom of conscience is the basis of the free exercise clause, and government may not penalize or discriminate against an individual or a group of individuals because of their religious views nor may it compel persons to affirm any particular beliefs.
However, feminist and gay extremists and their allies on the left have increasingly reinterpreted our nation’s laws regarding religious freedom and freedom of conscience in the light of the French Revolution to require the Catholic Church to violate its beliefs.
Alexander Hamilton observed in 1794 that:
“In the early periods of the French Revolution, a warm zeal for its success was in this Country a sentiment truly universal. The love of Liberty is here the ruling passion of the Citizens of the United States pervading every class animating every bosom. As long therefore as the Revolution of France bore the marks of being the cause of liberty it united all hearts and centered all opinions. But this unanimity of approbation has been for a considerable time decreasing. … It is not among the least perplexing phenomena of the present times, that a people like that of the United States—exemplary for humanity and moderation surpassed by no other in the love of order and a knowledge of the true principles of liberty, distinguished for purity of morals and a just reverence for Religion should so long persevere in partiality for a state of things the most cruel sanguinary and violent that ever stained the annals of mankind, a state of things which annihilates the foundations of social order and true liberty, confounds all moral distinctions and substitutes to the mild & beneficent religion of the Gospel a gloomy, persecuting and desolating atheism.”
Our democracy was founded on the basis of being free to believe as one desires without coercion. The Obama administration’s refusal to grant people of faith conscience protections on abortion, its effort to tell religious groups who it must or must not consider clergy and its stance on homosexuality shows its faith in the French Revolution rather than the American.
And polls reflect the Democrats’ hostility toward and ignorance of Christian beliefs and practices.
“A Gallup poll released Monday highlights the religious spilt between Democrats and Republicans, showing that 52 percent of Democrats seldom or never attend church. And the percentage of Democrats who attend church weekly has dropped two percentage points – down from 29 to 27 percent – since the first quarter of 2008.”
And things have gotten so bad that the Catholic bishops have begun to circle the wagons by forming a body solely devoted to preserving religious freedom.
As blogger David Crocket writes in the Trinitonian blog:
The contemporary assault on conscience is a perverse inversion of this theme, for it is nothing less than an assault on those who think differently, supposedly the hallmark of the tolerance agenda. And if government can violate freedom of conscience in this area, it won’t take long for the thought police to explore other targets of opportunity.
Conservatives have an obligation to take a stand for the freedom of conscience. Perhaps a start might be pressuring Congress and the state legislatures to pass James Madison’s original language for the First Amendment, which read to reaffirm it:
"The Civil Rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, nor on any pretext infringed. No state shall violate the equal rights of conscience or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases."
Take a stand against the left's effort to impose the values of the French Revolution on America.
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