A long, long time ago, like in the late 1980s, I was talking to this very devout born again Christian and said something about being grateful for the separation between church and state in the USA. She said, "I don't think there should be a separation between the church and state. I think God's law should be THE law."
I was little taken aback by that.This woman was not really in the mainstream of organized religions, and I thought for sure she'd appreciate the legal protection of minority religions (and minorities in general) that the Constituion extends.
The thing is, she wanted a union of church and state if it were her religion running things.
Hmmm....let's see. What nation is notorious for uniting the church and the state?
Iran, perhaps? Egypt moving in that direction? Libya, maybe? Chad? Mali? Saudi Arabia? Yemen? Places where they cut off your hands for theft and stone you death for talking to strangers.
Here's why there's a separation between the church and the state, and why it's in the First Amendment, accompanied by Freedom of Speech:
- When the government is also your religion.... oh dear, there's a horrendous way to start, no? Just smacks of something like marxist zeal, doesn't it? I mean, if you make it "secular."
- When those who violate government regulations are "condemned to burn in hell forever and ever"... oh heavens, is there no way to express this in a temperate way?
- When criticizing the government sets you up for charges of blashphemy... good grief, here we go again. Just sounds so extreme, doesn't it?
So maybe you begin to get the idea.
No accident I call this blog "The end of enlightenment." The era of Enlightenment, though it made tons of mistakes and was just bustin' with hubris, also ended 200 years of religious warfare in Europe -- and perhaps even including the Crusades, though apparently the Crusades are ongoing in some peoples' minds.
North America became something of a haven for groups of people persecuted by other groups of people -- Protestants against Catholics, Protestants against Protestants -- look it up. Once Henry VIII rejected the Holy Roman Church and established his own little religious empire, the floodgates opened for all sorts of smiting in the name of tiny variations in doctrine and/or practice, and the rampant breaking off the noses of the other guys' religious statues.
So we had Mary massacreing Protestants, and Elizabeth getting even. And Calvinists, and people for whom Calvinism was not brutal and self-loathing enough riding down on the Calvinists, and Huguenots who were pretty much slaughtered by.... somebody. And the Spanish Inquisition going after Christopher Columbus because he mentioned in his ship's log on a trip to the New World, that lights appeared in the sky arranged like a Minorah. Oh, my God, was he a closet Jew or what? Off with his heaed. And whoever it was who founded Rhode Island -- then promptly outlawed the practice of any other religion but his own. And spiders dangling over the fiery pit of Hell, and all that.
In Virginia, founded by the Crown and mostly loyal to the Crown for the most part, the planters got all pissed off about the "Parson's Pence." See, as a loyal English colony, settlements in Virginia had to have an Anglican parsonage. They paid for this with a tax on the goods (hemp, tobacco, indigo and the like) that they sent back to England. They wanted the tax to be a percentage of the value of their goods, so that if they had a bad year, the amount of the tax would go down to reflect that. But the Crown didn't like that idea. Anyway, it raised a big stink in the southern colonies, which were mostly agribusiness and not established by religious dissenters.
So when push came to shove over the Stamp Act and the tax on tea - and the repeal of the tax on tea, which actually sparked the Boston Tea Pary -- Adams and Jefferson, Madison, Hancock -- you know, all the Usual Suspects, decided -- Stuff it all. People can believe whatever they want. Like, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" and leave the rest alone.
So what does this have to do with Freedom of Speech?
Well, what do people talk about? Stuff they believe in? Policy issues? What's right and wrong?
If the government is God, can you speak against it/Him? That is, without being burned alive, stoned to death, beheaded, drawn and quartered, keel-hauled, imprisoned?
Yet I'm not condemning religion. (Yeah, LOL about the irony of that.) Religion -- or any set of principles and ethics -- provides individuals a personl foundation for making their own decisions and managing their own lives -- without the interference of government.
People need religion. And I'm quite certain the fact that America is such a religous nation, and always has been, is why it's remained relatively free for so long. Prior to Franklin Roosevelt and then Johnson's "Great Society," it was always the church or even non-demonomational religious organizations that provided charity, welfare, medical assistance for the poor, education for the poor, rescued women from brutal husbands, cared for orphans, and supported familes in poverty. So many fiery Victorian-era reformers demanding the construction of sewers, discouraging alcoholism and drug abuse. And they were rather more efficient than today's government bureaucracies -- even though it was these same reformers that launched the push to have their reforms inscribed in law.
In other wods, we didn't need no stinkin' nanny state. We had other resources. We still do. It's just that searching out and finding, and then publicizing and politicizing pockets of poverty and injustice has become a sort of state religion nowadays, as practiced by the Comrade and all his little cohorts -- Pazzo Pelosi, Brain-Dead Harry Reid, et. al.
If they can't find some downtrodden wreck in the USA to hold up as evidence of indifference and cruelty, they go hunitng overseas. And I think that's probably why they're so loathe to recognize that jihadists are a total mess and a threat to the world. the jihadists, in their view, are simply the next batch of misunderstood, discriminated against victims in a cold, mean world. I mean, this is the kind of bullshit they truly believe in. Be nice to the cutthrats and pirates, pander to their whims, send them F-16s and billions of US aid and they'll come to like and respect us.
The thing is, the jihadists have learned to "work the system." I mean apart from Saudi Arabia, who funds these guys -- the USA, through so-called "humanitarian" aid.
And I can say it's bullshit, and even prove that it is bullshit, because of The First Amendment -- free speech and the separation of church and state..
The fact that so many "progressives" -- including the Comrade -- don't like the First Amendment and often suggest it should be "corrected" or "protected" proves my point.
The fact that the Founding Fathers understood the importance of their own rhetoric... those guys were just amazing. They dug so deep, got so close to the heart of political matters, understood so well what government should and shouldn't do -- complete genius. Figured out how one tiny little rule could remake the whole world -- those guys were something else.
I miss them.
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