Written by Jerry Newcombe

Dr. Richard Land once called our country, “the divided states of America.” How apt — especially when we survey the various responses to the coronavirus. They are lessons in liberty and lessons in tyranny.

To paraphrase what a friend of mine wrote me recently, “We have 50 real-world government examples of liberty or tyranny — 50 real-time experiments in whether state governments moved towards liberty (as in Texas and South Dakota) or absolute control (as in California, Michigan and New York).” As a resident, I would add: Florida’s leadership is doing a great job.

Churches Closed, Planned Parenthood Open

Nowhere can this contrast be better seen than in how the state authorities deal with churches versus how they deal with abortion, ordering churches closed while deeming Planned Parenthood and other abortionists “essential services.”

How fitting. In her classic book, Godless, Ann Coulter postulates that abortion is the left’s “sacrament.” The sacraments of the church are out. The left’s new sacrament is in. The most pro-abortion leaders are the ones who are most cracking down on real constitutional freedoms in their states. If a politician gets abortion wrong, they tend to get everything else wrong too.

This anti-religious spirit at work is exceedingly ironic because America was born as a religious nation. In the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims explained their reason for coming: “For the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.”

Our First Amendment declares our first freedom — freedom of religion. The founders stipulated there would be no national denomination and there would be no prohibition on the “free exercise” of religion. They didn’t add, “except in times of pestilence.”

“No Pandemic Exception to the Bill of Rights”

Indeed, Attorney General William Barr sides with the churches (following social distancing guidelines, etc.) in this conflict. He said, “There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.”

But many of the left today have used the pandemic crisis to try and shut down a lot of religious services:

• The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri was demanding that churches hand over a list of anyone who attended any of their services. When Mat Staver and Liberty Counsel threatened to sue, the city backed down.

• The governor of Illinois postulated that church services may need to be banned for a year. This is the same governor who prohibited residents in his state from traveling — while apparently his wife vacationed in Florida.

• Overzealous administrators have sought to ban churches even from holding “drive-in” church services, which follow the mandates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

If your church parking lot permits, holding a drive-in service is a clever way to worship the Lord together. Usually, the pastor would preach to the congregation in their cars though a low frequency on the FM dial in such services.

“A Lesson to Governors”

But even in the Bible belt, such as in Kentucky and Mississippi, some overzealous administrators have tried to shut such services down. First Liberty Institute has threatened lawsuits, and the cities have relented.

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial entitled, “Caesar, God and the Lockdowns,” in which they note, “A federal court ruling on religious liberty is a lesson to governors.”

The editorial talks about Maryville Baptist Church in Louisville, which held a modest Easter service — with some worshipers inside and others in the parking lot, hearing the service through a loudspeaker.

To harass the worshipers, notes the WSJ, “The police took down license-plate numbers. The church sued.”

A panel on the Sixth Circuit ruled in favor of the church: “It’s not always easy to decide what is Caesar’s and what is God’s — and that’s assuredly true in the context of a pandemic. … Why is it safe to wait in a car for a liquor store to open but dangerous to wait in a car to hear morning prayers?”

The Left-Right Divide in Leadership

A new report out of Chicago over the weekend shows the lengths to which the anti-God forces will go. Wirepoints observes that the mayor sought to punish a church, Philadelphia Romanian Church, to prevent it from holding services. They stated, “On Sunday morning the tow trucks descended — not just on churchgoers, but on residents and everybody else, and on a private lot used by parishioners.”

The pastor of the church said, “The mayor is inciting hate against the church which is very sad. A lot of our members risked their lives to escape Communism, only to find it germinating in 2020 under Mayor Lightfoot in Chicago.” Lori Lightfoot is so committed to abortion rights, she helped drive out of office one of the last Democrat, pro-life U. S. Congressmen.

Wirepoints adds, “It should also be a clarion call to the churches across the city as to how far the left will go to crush the faithful of all denominations.”

Freedom-loving Americans can look at a map of the country and see how those on the left versus those on the right are delicately handling the crisis. The abortion-loving, church-hating politicians stand in great contrast with their freedom-loving counterparts in the red states.

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is a senior producer and an on-air host for D. James Kennedy Ministries. He has written or co-written 32 books, such as The Unstoppable Jesus Christ, American Amnesia: Is American Paying the Price for Forgetting God?, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy) and the bestseller, George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Peter Lillback). Learn more at jerrynewcombe.com and follow him on Twitter @newcombejerry.

“When you pull up your anchor and you have no moral compass that says true north, then increasingly you lose the ability to understand what’s normal,” warns Dr. Richard Land, who leads Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Land is commenting about so-called “bathroom bills” and transgendered people, a cultural battle in which some state governments have reacted to the relatively new controversy of mentally ill men stating they are women and demanding access to women’s restrooms and locker rooms.

The most infamous political fight took place in North Carolina, where then-Gov. Pat McCrory and legislators took action with bill HB2 after a Charlotte ordinance forced business owners to allow men to use women’s restrooms or be fined for refusing to do so.

Homosexual activists reacted as expected: McCrory was denounced as “transphobic” and a hater (and narrowly lost re-election); the Department of Justice announced it would sue; and LBGT-supporting companies were pressured to pressure state officials with a threat of fleeing corporations and lost jobs.

A year later, Texas lawmakers are currently in a special session dealing with the issue of bathroom policy. One of two bills submitted in the House would require people to use the bathroom, showers and other private facilities based on their born gender. Another bill deals strictly with schools.

Land says progressives, meanwhile, are increasingly unable to state what is moral and normal.

“And if nothing is normal,” he says “then everything is normal.”

OneNewsNow has reported how the American Psyschiatric Association softened the term “gender identify disorder” to “gender dysphoria” in 2013 under pressure from homosexual activists.

Beyond the issue of men identifying as women, there is also a left-wing demand to identify people according to their preferred gender, with supposed gender pronouns such as “ze” and “zir” used in place of “him” and “her.”

There is also an ongoing demand to address people by their self-identified gender identities, now numbering more than 50, such as “agender,” “pangender,” and “gender fluid.”

Much like the Charlotte ordinance, New York City is threatening to fine business owners who cite the wrong pronoun to transgendered customers.

The newest boundaries being pushed include a grown man who identifies as a little girl and a man-turned-woman who identifies as a dragon, and even a woman who identifies as blind after pouring drain cleaner in her eyes with the help of a psychologist.

Texans don’t agree with such loony demands, says Land, pointing to polling that suggests a majority of husbands and fathers oppose a biological male using the shower and restroom with their wives and daughters.

“Frankly, I’ll be very honest with you, I don’t really care who goes to the bathroom with me,” Land says. “I do care a great deal about who goes to the bathroom with my wife and my two daughters.”

This article was originally posted at OneNewsNow.com