It may reach the point where religious believers have to go to jail in protest before citizens realize that their basic freedoms are being taken away from them. Do not forget that 65 years ago, California’s government was advocating the imprisonment of tens of thousands of its own citizens as enemy agents, leading to the mass evacuations and “internment” in concentration camps of Japanese Americans. The murderous Nazi prejudice against Jews had its counterpart against a different minority in California.

Fortunately, the Texas Supreme Court affirmed that religious teachings about sexual practices are not per se child abuse justifying deprivation of liberty from children and their parents. If the court had gone the other way, and supported prejudice against a minority religion as justifying a finding of “imminent harm,” the California zealots of the homosexual agenda might have used it as precedent to someday take similar actions against parents teaching their children traditional views about sex outside heterosexual marriage.

This kind of false dichotomy demonstrates the utter lack of familiarity with the scriptures that characterizes so much invocation of the Bible by politicians. It is in the same vein as Obama’s assertion that the Sermon on the Mount preaches tolerance of homosexual acts against the “intolerance” of Paul’s letters, when in fact the Sermon of Jesus emphasizes strict accountability for sexual sin–even for thinking about it–while Paul’s plea is for those Christians who had left homosexual acts behind them to not fall back into them, so they do not nullify the mercy and forgiveness that they had already received from Christ.

It is such picking and choosing among passages of scripture that Shakespeare seems to refer to when he says that “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
(William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), “The Merchant of Venice”, Act 1 scene 3) As John noted, it dishonors the Bible to think one can use a sentence from it as authority out of the context of all the other paragraphs, chapters, and books. What makes the Bible authoritative is that it comes from God, who is the ultimate author and authority of the whole. One cannot claim authorization from God while intentionally disregarding many of His words that are also relevant to the topic under discussion.

But should we be surprised by this abuse of scripture? Not when we realize that this “pick and choose” approach is also the way that liberal judges approach the constitutions of the US and its states. In the process of finding new “constitutional rights” that limit the choices of legislatures and voters, those judges ignore the fundamental principle that the most important “rights” guarded by any constitution are the rights of democratic self-government, the right to be free from rule by the whims of an oligarchy, such as the class of judges. For liberals, neither the Bible nor constitutions are sacred.

The fundamental problem is that the habit of “lawyering” with biased arguments on behalf of a client, which is inherent to the adversarial system of the common law courts, is being improperly extended to the political arena where we are supposed to be building consensus and unity, not pursuing division and contention and a “win or lose” mindset that allows for no compromise or even a concession that the other side has an honorable purpose in mind. Candidates are afraid that if the voters do not see an election as a life-or-death decision, they will not bother to vote.

The irony is that most lawsuits actually end up being resolved by a settlement in compromise, usually without a trial and its argumentation before a jury, but there is no room for compromise in the political arena, since any concession is viewed as an admission against interest, and a sign of weakness and lack of confidence in one’s own side.

When religion gets coopted into this unduly adversarial process, churches are pushed to take sides, when there is much more to a real church than political positions. (The problem with the church Obama recently resigned from is that it had apparently become more of a political advocate than a means to spiritual salvation for its members.)

I . . . wanted to know if you had noticed this little bit of Canadian politicization of religious speech.

The good Rev Boissoin is prohibited from making “disparaging comments” about either homosexuals or his attackers for the rest of his life! This in a town whose streets I strolled only last year! Contrasted to the Steyn case, where he is accused of ‘hate speech’ toward a religion, the obvious human rights commission double standard operating just north of us should be a warning. The Establishment clause may someday only protect the politically correct and, thus, favored believers. Comments?

MLEH