Posted on 12/02/2003 4:58:30 PM PST by Federalist 78
The liberals who went after Roy Moore would like to do the same thing to anyone who stands up for God in the public square.
When Alabama's judicial ethics panel voted to oust State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, it provided the most vivid illustration yet of the great irony playing itself out in our day.
Many in the United States legal system are engaged in an effort to destroy the very foundation on which our nation's laws are based. The Judeo-Christian system of morality has served as western civilization's legal foundation for centuries, yet today many judges believe they can destroy that foundation and still maintain a lawful society.
For decades, members of the U.S. Supreme Court not only tolerated our biblical foundations, they openly embraced them. In an 1892 decision, the court stated, "Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of The Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. This is a religious people. This is historically true . . . this is a Christian nation." (Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States 1892)
President Coolidge acknowledged "The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country."
Coolidge understood that if the foundations are destroyed, our nation won't just cease to be moral, it could very well cease being a nation at all.
There is nothing in our nation's founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights — that would lead a reasonable person to conclude that a judge could not display the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. So where did the courts get the idea?
Perhaps U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black can best be blamed. In order to arrive at some of the damaging church and state decisions the court made in the 1950s and 1960s, Black took us on a journey through Thomas Jefferson's personal writings. In them, he found a letter Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association extolling the "wall of separation between church and state."
Was Jefferson arguing that religious people should not influence government? That would be difficult to believe, considering the fact that two days after writing his famous letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson could be found sitting in the halls of Congress, listening to a sermon from Baptist Pastor John Leland, one of many religious services held in government buildings during Jefferson's administration.
Despite efforts by the legal left to paint Judge Moore as an extremist, he fails to fit the mold. I have had the privilege of spending time with Judge Moore recently and found him to be both reasonable and well-spoken.
When he ran for chief justice in 2000, he did so on a platform built on returning the legal system to its moral underpinnings. In fact, he was known as the "Ten Commandments Judge" during that campaign. The people of Alabama overwhelmingly chose to place Moore in office, and they still support him today. That sentiment seems widespread. A recent Gallup poll found 77 percent of Americans disagree with the court ordering Moore to remove his monument.
Judge Moore is demonstrating the difference between holding a belief and holding convictions. Beliefs run rampant today. But a conviction is the willingness to act on a belief regardless of the consequence. Most Americans say they believe in God, but Judge Moore risked his career by sticking to his belief that God's laws supercede man's. Those kind of convictions are hard to find today.
Ultimately, the decision against Moore will serve as one more warning shot aimed at Americans of all faith backgrounds. The message: "Go ahead and believe in God, but carry that belief into the public square and it will cost you dearly."
Make no mistake, the case against Judge Roy Moore is not an effort to protect Americans from state-sponsored religion; it is about moving people of religious conviction further to the margins of public life. It moves us closer to a day when only those willing to bow down before the altar of religious neutrality will be deemed fit for public service.
Robert E. Reccord is president of the North American Mission Board, a Southern Baptist agency based in Alpharetta, Ga.
World Magazine & Dr. Richard Land of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president, Dr. Albert Mohler are liberal in this respect and have greatly contributed to the rule of an unlawful order at the expense of the rule of law. They do greatly err in thinking that a flawed judicial opinion is the supreme law of the land and that representatives take an oath of office to defend an uphold same. Perhaps U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black can best be blamed.
Amendment V: Barron v. Baltimore
In compliance with a sentiment thus generally expressed, to quiet fears thus extensively entertained, amendments were proposed by the required majority in congress, and adopted by the states. These amendments contain no expression indicating an intention to apply them to the state governments. This court cannot so apply them.
Bartkus v. Illinois, 359 U.S. 121 (1959) (USSC+)
The Fourteenth Amendment does not impliedly extend the first eight amendments to the States. Pp. 124-126 .
Jaffree v. Bd of School Comm., 554 F. Supp. 1104 (1983)
The historical record clearly establishes that when the fourteenth amendment was ratified in 1868 that its ratification did not incorporate the first amendment against the states. The debates in Congress at the time the fourteenth amendment was being drafted, the re-election speeches of the various members of Congress shortly after the passage by Congress of the fourteenth amendment, the contemporaneous newspaper stories reporting the effect and substance of the fourteenth amendment, and the legislative debates in the various state legislatures when they considered ratification of the fourteenth amendment indicate that the amendment was not intended to apply the establishment clause against the states because the fourteenth amendment was not intended to incorporate the federal Bill of Rights (the first eight amendments) against the states. A recent Gallup poll found 77 percent of Americans disagree with the court ordering Moore to remove his monument.
I know that before I found FR, I really did not think that many people shared my beliefs.
You have the Suppressed News: News for America and RE-TAKING AMERICA - Alabama's Ten Commandments - Main Page radio broadcast, way down south of ya, available on the Internet.
Answer.........'The Hague'.
/sarcasm
Just take a look around.
If the foundations are destroyed,
What can the righteous do? (Psalm 11:3)
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