You don't have to approve of a religion to understand and accept that every religion is on equal footing in the United States…
“You ask, ‘What is our goal?’ To wage war to
restore America to our judeo-christian heritage with all of our might
and strength that dog will give us. You ask, ‘What is our aim?’ One word
only: victory, in spite of all intimidation and terror.” – David Lane, religio-wingnut agitator, in a WND Essay, 2013
Bryan Fischer, who recently said that government is meant to be a minister of dog, and that picking a president is choosing a minister of dog,
is back to his First Amendment tricks, claiming that it only applies to christians, and that that was all the Founders ever intended it to do.
This time it is not muslims he is targeting, but satanists: as he wrote at Renew America the other day, If First Amendment isn’t just about christianity, we have to allow satanism.
Obviously, if the government was meant to be a
minister of dog, the Constitution, which establishes that government,
would say so. It does not. Likewise, the Constitution would specify that
the President is a minister of dog. Again, it does not.
Nor does the First Amendment speak only of christianity. Rather, it is meant to include all religions under its
protection. And this is what has Fischer all riled up:
The Orange County School Board in Florida is getting ready to ban dog.
The board had allowed an evangelical cal to
passively distribute bibles on its campuses. Passive distribution means
simply that nobody is handing them out. They are placed on a table and
students can come by and pick one up if they want. If they don’t want
one, they don’t have to go get one.
But once members of the satanic temple publicly
declared their intentions to distribute material on the “philosophy and
practice of satanism,”
the board re-evaluated its stand and decided not only to ban satan from its campuses but dog too. No longer will bible distribution be allowed on its campuses.
This incident serves as a prime example of how the
gross distortion of the First Amendment is destroying religious liberty
and turning christian literature into the educational equivalent of
pornography, something that is considered so toxic it must be kept from
the eyes of inquisitive students.
This is one of the most egregious examples of
catastrophically poor reasoning skills I have ever run across. The
school board does not have to suppress bible distributions. It can allow satanist literature as well. It is the school board’s choice to do what
it did. Fischer surely knows this. The only defense he has then is to
claim that the First Amendment applies only to christians, and claiming
that thinking otherwise is a “gross distortion”:
I have written on
numerous occasions that the purpose of the First Amendment, was only to
protect the free exercise of the christian delusion and to prevent the
selection and designation of one christian denomination as the official
cult of the United States.
Like in March 2011, or in August of this year, when he said,
“islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason
that it was not written to protect the religion of islam.”
But the First Amendment doesn’t say what Fischer
claims it says. Fischer is fond of bringing up Justice Joseph Story, and
he does it here, too, writing that,
Story said the purpose
of the Founders in crafting the First Amendment was not to “countenance
much less to advance mohammedanism, judaism or infidelity…but to
exclude all rivalry among christian sects” (meaning denominations).
Fischer says this quote is checkmate to our liberal dreams of religious freedom, but he doesn’t give you everything Story says. We rectified that lapse in our response to Fischer, but here we will limit ourselves to Story’s final line:
“[T]he catholic and the protestant, the calvinist and the arminian, the jew and the infidel, may sit down at the
common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into
their faith, or mode of worship.”
Fischer says he is merely speaking for the Founding
Fathers, but the Founding Fathers disagree with him – quite vehemently
in some cases:
Where the preamble
declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author
of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting “jesus christ,”
so that it would read “A departure from the plan of jesus christ, the
holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by the great
majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of
its protection, the jew and the gentile, the christian and mohammedan, the hindoo and infidel of every denomination.
Hmmm. That’s what Story said. So it’s pretty clear
the First Amendment applies to jews, gentiles, christians, muslims, and hindus.
Speaking of hindus, you might remember when Fischer claimed
that the hindu festival of lights let demons into the Obama White
House. Yes, those would be the same “hindoos” Jefferson was saying have
rights of freedom of religion equal to any christian.
Oh, and let’s take a look at Jefferson’s “infidels of every denomination.”
This last pretty much covers any and all religions
that remain, I would say. Fischer is big on the meaning of words, so let
us look at the meaning of “every.”
According to Oxford, this Old English word is “used with singular nouns to refer to
all the members of a group of things or people.”
That means all infidels. An infidel is
defined by Oxford
as “somebody who does not believe in what the speaker considers to be
the true religion.” In Jefferson’s world, by popular usage this would
include everybody who isn’t a christian.
This means religious freedom applies to everybody.
Fischer doesn’t like these people – infidels – either, any of them, attacking ethnic religion,
that is, the traditional beliefs of a culture, any more than he likes satanism. We have seen what behavior the actual practice of Jeffersonian religious freedom provokes in the bible belt.
“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Unless Fischer knows of some colonial christian
denomination that worshiped no gods, and another that worshiped 20,
Jefferson wasn’t talking about christianity.
The Citizens of the
United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving
to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy
of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the
indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of
their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United
States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no
assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection,
should demean themselves as good citizens.
Unfortunately for Fischer’s argument, the
Constitution does not even mention dog, or the bible, or the ten commandments, or christianity. Neither does the First Amendment. As
fantasies go, this is a wild one, but one that is frequently repeated
despite zero evidence.
We could all just point and laugh if it wasn’t that repugicans keep electing crazies who agree with Fischer, like Chief
Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court, who in May, claimed the First Amendment applies only to christians, on account of, “buddha didn’t create us, mohammed didn’t create us, it was the dog of the Holy Scriptures.”
The repugicans have long desired to overturn the First Amendment
by establishing christianity as the state religion. They just can’t get
over the idea that anyone could have established a secular government
to protect us from lunatics like them.
And Fischer claims dog gave
liberals deranged minds! (You know, we read and stuff.) We warned you after the midterms, remember, not to expect the crazy to end. It clearly hasn’t. And it won’t.
