The costs of losing the information war are bipartisan. It’s not just low information voters on the political left that are the problem, as there are plenty of low information folks on the right when it comes to certain issues. The critical nature of culture and what the founders meant by religious liberty are the weak points for too many “conservatives.”
I keep saying that all the issues are the same when it comes to the information war, and all the issues are connected. Two excerpts — first up, Ryan Anderson makes an imporant point in his article, “The Relationship Between Planned Parenthood and Redefining Marriage”:
[B]oth the pro-choice movement and the movement to redefine marriage reduce human community to contract and consent and limit our obligations to other human beings to those we have freely chosen. Consider their slogans: “My body, my choice.” “I consented to sex, not to having a baby!” “Love makes a marriage.” “Marriage should last as long as the love lasts.” They all reflect the belief that consenting adults should do whatever they want to do, a belief that puts adult desire before the needs of children. And weakening marriage will lead to a culture with more nonmarital sex, thus more nonmarital pregnancy, and sadly more abortion.
Read more: The Daily Signal
By the way, when individuals reduce their obligations to others, ever bigger government fills in the gap.
Our second excerpt is from Bryan Fischer at BarbWire.com. I know for a fact that many political conservatives are basically ignorant when it comes to what the Founders meant when they established religious liberty as our first freedom. Fischer writes about the weirdos looking to set up statues of Satan around the country:
How can this be stopped?
Well, we can’t do it with the Constitution as it has been mangled by the courts. But the Constitution given to us by the Founders can stop this demonic process in its tracks.
…
When the Founders used the word “religion,” they were referring to the various denominations of Christianity. The population of the United States at the time of the founding was 99.8% Christian and 0.2% Jewish. There were simply no other religious traditions for the Founders even to deal with.
As Joseph Story makes clear, in the First Amendment the Founders were dealing exclusively with Christianity. Story was the longest serving associate justice in Supreme Court history, was appointed to the bench by James Madison, the father of the Constitution, and wrote a monumental and authoritative history of the Constitution.
Here’s how he describes what the goal of the Founders was in crafting the First Amendment:
“The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.”
The Founders did not either “countenance” or “advance” religious alternatives to Christianity in the First Amendment. They were not even considering Islam or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism or atheism. They were dealing exclusively with Christianity and its various denominations.
The purpose of the First Amendment was to prevent Congress from picking one Christian “sect” – we use the word “denomination” today – and make it the established church of the fledgling nation. Then, secondly, the aim of the First Amendment was to prevent Congress from interfering with the free exercise of the Christian religion anywhere in the new nation.
Read more: BarbWire.com
Image credit: barbwire.com.
