Limbaugh Shows How Intolerant 'Liberals' Wage War on Christianity

NewsMax.com ^ | Sept. 30, 2003 | Phil Brennan

[Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS]

All across America, Christianity is under attack. The battlegrounds in this war are the nation’s courtrooms, schools, the media and within federal and state governments.

Now, for the first time a courageous American lawyer, author and columnist, David Limbaugh, has gathered a mass of documentation showing how far this war against those who worship Jesus Christ has progressed.

In his new, best-selling book, "Persecution – How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," Limbaugh exposes the outrageous bias and discrimination against Christians.

Wherever the forces aligned against Christianity can find a legal loophole, an agnostic judge, government official, school administrator, professor or teacher, the full weight of the law is employed to drive the faith from the public square.

Limbaugh explains what Christians are facing on dozens of fronts. The examples of the multiple successes of anti-Christian campaign present a frightening picture.

In this first part of a three-part series, NewsMax.com explores the geneses of this campaign, looks back at how America’s government schools developed out of a widespread system of Christian schools, recalls the growth of anti-Christian law, and provides examples of how the war has been fought against the nation’s schoolchildren.

Driving Christianity out of America’s Schools

Even if you were reading ""Persecution – How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity" in a freezer with the temperature way below zero, your blood would still boil.

David Limbaugh pulls no punches in reporting the unrelenting assault on Christianity being waged against it by a collection of latter-day Neros who want nothing less than to throw Christians to the lions of total secularism.

Christians, he tells us, "are often subjected to scorn and ridicule and denied their religious freedoms" and are referred to as "Bible-thumping idiots."

One incident he mentions should turn up the heat under the arteries of any devout Jew or Christian who cherishes the Holy Bible as the word of God. He tells the shocking story of a teacher at a Houston middle school who saw two students carrying Bibles. The girls were taken to the principal’s office, and the mother of one was summoned. Upon her arrival the teacher "waved the Bibles at her and exclaimed ‘This is garbage’ and then threw them into the trash can."

Among today’s Neros, the author explains, are "activist judges misinterpreting the law," the idiot acolytes of political correctness, Hollywood movie makers, the overwhelmingly paganistic mainstream media, and "educators" at all levels from preschool to universities.

Limbaugh, a skilled lawyer, goes to some length in explaining the constitutional underpinnings of religious freedom and shows how legions of black-robed tyrants have badly distorted the meaning of the First Amendment, imputing to it shadings and gradations never intended by the men who wrote the Bill of Rights.

This facet of the war against Christianity recently came to the fore during the infamous case of the federal court-ordered removal from the courthouse in Montgomery, Ala., of a monument containing the text of the Ten Commandments.

If You Tell a Lie Often Enough ...

Thanks to the issues raised by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, for the first time many Americans were startled to learn that the famous slogan of "separation of church and state" they’ve been told bans government at all levels from allowing religious expression within public facilities or by official bodies is nowhere to be found in the Constitution of the United States.

It is a largely a judicial fiction based on a deliberate misreading of the Establishment Clause "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and the Free Exercise Clause, which follows: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

It was not until 1947 that any other meaning than that which forbade Congress (but not the states) from setting up a state-sponsored religion was found. In that year, in the case of Everson vs. Board of Education, Justice Hugo Black took a passage from a private letter Thomas Jefferson sent to a friend in which he mentioned an alleged "wall of separation" and made it a key part of the Constitution, where, as noted above, it is nowhere to be found.

All of the subsequent court actions concerning the state vs. religion grew out of Black’s misleading view of the Establishment Clause. From that point on the courts have steadily eroded the prohibition against the "free exercise" of religion.

The full impact of this misreading of the Constitution became apparent with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Engel vs. Vitale, which outlawed state-sponsored prayer in government schools (it's no longer accurate to call them "public" schools; they serve the government, not the public that pays for them). In that case the prayer at issue was non-denominational: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."

In the first part of his book, Limbaugh laments the damage done to America’s schools that has resulted from the courts’ open hostility to religion, especially to Christianity which has become a target of federal judges seeking to drive Jesus Christ out of the public arena.

He provides an exhaustive history of the growth of public/government education, largely a mid-19th century development that built upon a disparate network of local schools in the various states that were fully Christian in every sense of the word. All education in the U.S. was erected on a platform of Christian schools, and even after public schools became the norm, Christianity was an important part of the curriculum upon which all other subjects were taught.

The author traces the development of secularism in the government school system, which he says many Protestant leaders claim was the result of the work of Horace Mann, a Massachusetts legislator who played a key role in establishing the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837.

The Thought Police

Limbaugh cites some of the shocking results of the enforced secularization of public education:

A teacher at the same school where the Bible was described as garbage confiscated book covers that contained the Ten Commandments and threw them in the trash saying the Commandments were "hate speech" that might offend other students.

In May 1995, U.S. District Court Samuel B. Kent of the Southern District of Texas decreed that any student uttering the word "Jesus" would be arrested and tossed in the pokey for six months.

Said this blacked-robed Nero: "And make no mistake, the court is going to have a United States marshal in attendance at the graduation. If any student offends this court, that student will be arrested and will face up to six months incarceration in the Galveston County Jail for contempt of court. Anyone who thinks I’m kidding about this order better think again … Anyone who violates these orders, no kidding, is going to wish that he or she had died as a child when this court gets through with it."

Thank God this Nero had no lions around to feed with Christians.

Limbaugh sums up this part of the book by commenting that: "When you consider that the first common schools in this country were established for the purpose of Christian instruction, the current climate of hostility to all in the public school environment is sobering."

The separationists, he warns, "are determined to purge public schools of Christian thought, symbols and expression."

Editor's Note: Get "Persecution – How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," the latest book by the author of "Absolute Power." David Limbaugh exposes the farce of leftist "tolerance" and reveals the true agenda of "liberals" who abuse the law to force Christianity out of the public square. Click here now.

[MissouriForBush]

Part of the purpose of a church IS to be a social club. That's the way Southern churches have functioned for centuries. Southerners are raised to be social and gracious, and make others around them feel comfortable. It's all about fellowship and if we strengthen it over Sunday dinners of fried chicken, homemade gravy, candied yams and mouth-watering pies -- is that such a horrid little sin?

[Sonnyw]

Thanks for a specific, succint example of what a Christian would change. In reply, I'd say first that your mother's Senior Citizen's center must be government supported. It is not illegal for privately-funded centers to have staff-run or staff-condoned sectarian prayers. So, taxes from Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, Wiccans, and on and on support your mother's center (good for all of us; that's a worthy objective for my taxes). So, what would happen if a Jewish mother resented your mother's plea to Christ? What would happen if an Atheist mother or a Wiccan mother wanted to also lead the group in their particular kind of prayer? Wouldn't your mother feel rather oppressed to have to listen to someone else's religious or spiritual beliefs just before she was going to eat?

Remember, this country was founded mostly by Christian sects who were fleeing Europe's religious oppression. Alas, these sects soon started bickering and forming exclusive colonies. Baptists were actually hung in the colonial days for their refusal to abide by some sect's particular beliefs (yes, American Christians killed other American Christians in the name of sectarian "purity"). That's why the First Amendment should be sancrosanct in American's hearts. Your mother needs to be protected so that she can enjoy her own particular faith free of impositions of all kinds from people of another faith.

[MissouriForBush]

Sonny, everybody where I come from is Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic...So I say states' rights, majority rules. My ancestors WERE exactly the Christians you speak of -- French Huguenots, for example. All of those groups above have no problem with a prayer being said before lunch.

This is a states' rights issue.

[B-Chan]

I don‘t know why everyone seems so surprised by this. The persecution of Christianity by the republican State and by the non-Christian groups which empower it are the natural result of any system of non-sacramental government. In any State where the government rules “of the people, by the people, and for the people”, it necessarily follows that the power of that State is limited only by the will of “the people” (i.e. those who make the laws and control the armed forces). In other words, even the best-intentioned republic eventually ends up as a tyranny, with all power residing in the hands of a small elite of demagogues and enforced by the Mob they control. Such a tyranny follows the overthrow of sacramental government as surely and as naturally as water running downhill; this fundamental flaw (common to all forms of representative government) is a product of human nature – the natural desire to hold on to power. To those in power, there can be only one law in town: their own, crafted by their own human hands. To them, anyone holding an allegiance to any law or authority other than their own is a threat, and common sense dictates that any threat – however small — be neutralized as quickly and completely as possible. Thus, to the demagogues who always end up in coontrol of the Republic, the only sensible course of action is to persecute, oppress, and in time eliminate those who do not accept their authority as being supreme and unlimited.

It goes without saying that the true Christian reserves his highest allegiance to God and His Law – a sin that no Republic can afford to forgive.

Popular government is flawed and un-Christian at its very fundament. The traditional Christian concept of government is the divine hierarchy: God to King to Lord to freeman, peasant, or serf. All authority comes from God as a sacrament by way of the Church. He who bears the Crown bears the burden of upholding the Natural Law within his desmesne; he is, like Christ, both Lord and Servant of his people. The king is limited in his powers by his Faith and by the sanction of the Church; should either be removed, his status as King disappears and his power is transferred to his legitimate successor.

The scramental state is based on love and loyalty, nou upon nose-counting. The King's capacity for tyranny is limited by the love of the common folk (with their scythes), he loyalty of his peers (with their arms and retainers) and by his own loyalty to God and God's Church (with its ability to excommunicate). Like the family, the sacrammental state is an institution founded upon Duty – to God, to Peer, to Subject, to Liege Lord, to Sovereign – not upon the self-centered notion of personal Liberty.

A Republic, which replaces God with the will of the people (“the consent of the governed”) has no such limitations. Unlike the Natural Law, the Republic is ordained and established by the constitution, a written or unwritten artiifice that is subject to reinterpretation at will by judges (who are either elected – and thus beholden to their electorates – or appointed, which puts them in the service of their patrons among the power elite). Thus, the power of the Republic is in fact unlimited, and will in time inevitably become more and more centralized in the hands of those with the resources and skill to manipulate the sans-culottes into legitimizing whatever their whims decree. The road to the abolition of man is thus paved with the ballots of the well-intentioned.

Any government that is not specifically and constitutionally founded on the Christian faith is a ticking time-bomb. The Christians of the Vendée found that out; we will, too. In a state where power and law are both made by men, power has no bounds and law will come to mean whatever those who hold it want it to mean. What was true in 1793 is still true today: kill the King in the name of Liberty and you end up with a tyranny far worse than any the Crown ever imposed. Our day of reckoning is coming, just as surely as it did for the Christians of France. Aux barricades, citoyens! Ecrasez l'infame!

[HighWheeler]

"when Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and his leftist comrades began attacking some of President Bush’s nominees to the federal bench for the crime of having religious principles he feared might influence their judicial decisions.

Would that include "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not bear false witness", "Thou shalt not steal" or Clinton's worst "Thou shalt not commit adultery"?

Hmmmmm, Chuckie?

[HighWheeler]

Well for starters, simply refraining from continually and viciously harrassing Christians would be a good start.

Christianity-bashing is the biggest, and the only politically correct approved, form of hate-filled bigotry in America.

It was Jews in 1934 Germany, and it's Chritians in 2003 America. The fetid hatred now is driven by exactly the same type of people back then. All they need is to find their Hitler, and they can open up the ovens for business.

[GeekDejure]

What happened to your "about page"??? I started reading it last week and today I wanted to read further . . . but now it merely states: "Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS hasn't created an about page." Huh???

.

[Blue Collar Christian]

You want a list of what we want. Just make a list of what has been banned. Same list. Stop banning Christianity from the public. Treat the Christian American traditions of Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving as just that. Historic revision and political correctness are lies.

But in all that is and will be, we are told to expect just what is happening, though we are remiss to let is slide.

[Blue Collar Christian]

"Your mother needs to be protected so that she can enjoy her own particular faith free of impositons of all kinds from people of another faith."

Like atheism? Why does it seem to me that "non-practicing" Christians or Jews, actually atheists, along with avowed atheists lead the charge to push the Christian-Judeo religion out of the public forum? Nothing is removed without something else taking its place. In this case, the Christian religion is removed and the religion of atheism is installed. This is simply the evangelism of atheism, and woe to all who are a part of this success. We Christians are not to force our religion on atheists, only to share our faith with them, and move on if it is not accepted. I cannot say the same for atheists. (nor historically for the "Church")

[MissAmericanPie]

You think you are upset now, wait till they start lopping our heads off, as foretold in Revelation.

[Sonnyw]

I'm not "bashing Christianity" when I ask my government officials to refrain from taking actions which are clearly perceived as endorsing one religion or another. I'm simply asking that they abide by the U. S. Constitution.

[Sonnyw]

I'm sorry you have the perception that I'm endorsing atheism over Christianity. Nothing could be further from my intent. And I would never advocate the removal of Christian words and ideals from the "public forum," where ideas and beliefs should forever be unfettered. I am simply asking government to make no law respecting an establishment of religion. I am advocating the absence of religion (or no religion) from the "governmental realm," which is an entirely different area than the "public forum."

To do otherwise would eventually lead to government endorsement of a particular Christian sect over another Christian sect, just like we had in pre-colonial, pre-Constitution America. The First Amendment wasn't demanded by the Colonies for no reason at all. They feared that the Federal Government would supplant their own state-supported religion (different Christian sects in different colonies-soon-to-be-states). So, many states remained sectarian (e.g. Connecticut citizens were taxed to pay for Congregationalist churches). Sadly, the Civil War taught everyone that the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments) should apply to the States as well, and the 14th Amendment was added. This eventually (by Supreme Court decisions over the ensuing years) came to mean that the freedoms encompassed in the Bill of Rights could not be restricted by State legislatures. The First Amendment was finally applied to the States, and governments at all levels were finally told to remain neutral in regard to religion.

Religion or non-religion has no place in the governmental arena.

[Sonnyw]

I cringe whenever I hear the words "majority rules" brought into a debate about the First Amendment.

As stated by Justice Jackson in 1943’s decision, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (319 U.S. 624), "The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no election."

What part of this eloquent... and urgent... statement do you disagree with?

[Sonnyw]

"... wait till they start lopping our heads off, as foretold in Revelation."

Oh, please. Don't clutter a serious discussion with hysterical blather like this.

[Sonnyw]

"Just make a list of what has been banned."

That's not very helpful to my understanding exactly what it is that Christian's want corrected. For instance, school administrators have been "banned" from denying students the right to use school property for their Bible Clubs, or Christian Clubs. I support this Supreme Court decision, so am I to assume that this is one of those "bannings" you want "undone"?

Please, someone tell me how you would rewrite the First Amendment's establishment clause in order to remove all of those "banned" things that are causing such alarm among many Christians.

I'm still waiting on that list.

[Sonnyw]

"Any government that is not specifically and constitutionally founded on the Christian faith is a ticking time-bomb."

America's greatest strength lies in the undeniable fact that the above view is now and will forever remain in the minority.

[MissAmericanPie]

What's not serious about, "and I saw those that had been beheaded for their testimony of Jesus, who had not recieved the mark of the beast, neither his name".

[MissouriForBush]

We obviously approach the statement from two different directions. Your obsessive concern for the rights of the minority far overreach the original intent of our Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers framed the Constitution so that religious minorities would not be persecuted. In my book, your concept of persecution is far too thin-skinned and dilutes ad nauseum the original intent.

What if a bunch of high-school students demanded that their special cheerleading squad be allowed to assemble to boo their own high-school team at games, right next to the regular cheerleading squad? This is a tiny minority, but we're talking about infringing on freedom of expression and assembly, right? So you think it is absolutely necessary that they have this right, eh?

At my Mom's senior citizen center, all of the attendees are Protestants and Roman Catholics. Should they be denied their rights because a Wiccan in California or a Druid in New Jersey objects?

[Sonnyw]

First, let me say that I appreciate your tone. We may differ regarding religious freedom, religious intolerance, minority protection and the point when a secular government becomes an anti-religious one, but at least we agree that religious freedom is important enough to embody in the Constitution.

I am comfortable with the Supreme Court's interpretation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. All of their decisions have successfully embodied the letter and the spirit of our Founding Father's decisions, the impetus for which you correctly attribute to a fear of religious persecution (such as they experienced in Europe and were seeing repeated in the American colonies). Were I to feel differently and think that I was in the majority in this regard, I’d have only one recourse, to seek a Constitutional amendment.

The amendment process is our Founding Father’s single most brilliant innovation in peacefully governing man’s affairs. The majority can rule on any issue, but only after 2/3rd’s of the state legislatures agree. Every Mosque, Synagogue or Wiccan assembly could be prohibited if that’s what the majority of Americans want… as evidenced by the successful passing of a Constitutional amendment.

My obsessive concern for the rights of the minority matches the obsessive concerns of our Founding Fathers and those of every state legislature that voted for the newly-written U.S. Constitution… only after it included the Bill of Rights. (They did not, however, envision the application of the Bill of Rights to their state laws. That decision was made via the 14th Amendment and subsequent Supreme Court decisions.)

You can silence the man who yells fire in a crowded theater, so it’s perfectly consistent with the Constitution if you prohibit “booing cheerleaders” from the athletic field. Free speech is not protected if its principle purpose is to incite mayhem. Religious speech is another matter and an entirely different one if the school administration is involved in it.

You’ve changed the context in which we discussed your mother’s senior center. I thought the administrators of your mother’s center were behind the Christian prayers. It’s perfectly OK by me and my Wiccan friends in California or my Druid compatriots in New Jersey if your mother and her Protestant friends say a prayer before their meals… as long as no one objects. If your mother’s Jewish friend objects, however, and is made to eat at a later time or leave the dining room while “the Christians have their say,” then I’d want the center’s administrators to step in and ask your mother to respect the wishes of all the center’s residences. No Christian prayers if a minority of one object to them. Such are the special privileges afforded minorities when my tax money is used to finance the senior center. If it’s a privately-funded senior center, my position would be the same but I would not have the U.S. Constitution as support.

[MissouriForBush]

If it aint' broke, why fix it? For generations, we said prayers around here before meals and now it's a federal offense. If you're the one person who is too thin-skinned to listen to everybody else's 30-second prayer, you are the one with a problem. Just close your eyes and think of England.

My ancestors fought in the Revolution for LESS government and FREEDOM to pursue their lives in the type of community of their choice. If they wanted to be Buddhists, they would have moved to Asia or some community on the West Coast with a majority of Buddhists. They didn't risk their lives and property for the Big Brother rulers we have today sticking their noses into every nook and cranny of our lives. But that is obviously the type of government you want. You remind me of a child throwing a temper tantrum. "I can't have my way, so nobody else will, either."