James Lankford: Defending Religious Freedom Means Living Your Faith

Not living one’s faith can become a threat to religious liberty, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said while speaking on a panel Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“One of the greatest challenges we have to religious liberty in this modern day is people that actually claim a faith and don’t live a faith,” Lankford said. “Having a culture that is a vibrant culture of faith for people that not only have a faith, but they choose to live it, matters in our culture.”

“There are a whole group of people that say you can have a faith—just leave it over there, just don’t bring it out of your house,” Lankford continued. “Or that have a faith designation or a denomination designation, and it’s almost like a membership in a club for them.”

Lankford spoke to the crowd about how some foreign governments still require adherence to a religion. He noted that before the United States was a country, faith was not optional.

“Quite frankly, if you go back to the founding, we struggled with it in the very beginning, as well,” Lankford said. “As a Baptist, most Baptists were kicked out of the colonies early on because they weren’t accepted. Almost every colony had a designated religion for that colony, and if you weren’t that religion, you weren’t welcome.”

After the Constitution was ratified, the Founding Fathers determined the new country would not be like others, Lankford said:

I think the opportunities to live out your faith have been and will more so be restricted. On the subject I send the below letter to papers and commentators every fourth of July.

The 2015 gay marriage ruling means equal protection excludes tens of millions of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers who consider classical scholarship finds homosexual relationships separate people from God. The Bible continually speaks of the character, identity, and purpose of God; identifying Him as masculine and humans as feminine in relation to Him. After creating all things, He created the covenant of heterosexual marriage to example the unconditional love relationship He desires with humanity. Without disturbing the spiritual quality of marriage, equal protection could have been maintained by civil contracts with the elegant, expressions legislators so enjoy.

The First Amendment says and used to mean, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech….”

We are familiar with the term “speech or expression’, which seems an innocuous expansion of the above amendment. However, “expression” enables a nearly unbounded multibillion-dollar pornography industry.

Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion stated, “The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to advocate and teach the principles that are so fulfilling and central to their lives and faith”. Such language restricts speech and religious freedoms by excluding “free exercise thereof”.

The country has so departed from first principles that a woman can artistically express herself in adult films but cannot retain personal artistic identity when operating a bakery and exercising her religious convictions by refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.

The Formal End to Judeo-Christian America
http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2015/06/30/the-formal-end-to-judeochristian-america-n2018986/page/full
Wayne Cordeiro
https://www.facebook.com/pastorwaynecordeiro/posts/10153325310351210
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES GAY MARRIAGE
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf

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