We are pleased to announce that former state legislator Peter Breen has been added to our line-up of speakers for the IFI Special Forum on Religious Liberty.  In addition to being a pro-life hero, Peter leads the Thomas More Society’s Legal Team in service of its Life, Family, and Religious Liberty missions.

Peter recently testified in front of an Illinois House committee to highlight the legal and practical flaws of SB 1909 – a bill designed to punish traditional Christian beliefs about the sanctity of human life at pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) throughout Illinois. SB 1909 allows the Attorney General to investigate any PRC and levy fines up to $50,000 against any PRC that the he/she “believes” is engaging in deceptive practices.

What are false and deceptive practices? Any information the Attorney General believes is deceptive.

Once the Attorney General concludes its formal investigation with your tax dollars and imposes the fine against the PRC, the law would allow the Attorney General to provide this biased information to a person to file a civil suit against the PRC for more monetary damages. You can imagine the damage this will cause.

Planned Parenthood and Attorney General staff testified in favor of this freedom-quashing bill. Their argument contained no complaints (not one) that could be verified — they were all anecdotal accounts they claimed to have witnessed at PRC’s or heard second hand.

In fact, before the hearing, Peter had requested that the Attorney General’s Office provide all complaints it received against PRC’s in the last 10 years. Their response? Zero. Zero complaints against pregnancy care centers have been documented. There is simply no demand from “we the people” for a bill like this. It’s another opportunity for Big Abortion and their allies in the General Assembly to go after and bully people of faith into silence.

Make no mistake, this is an infringement on the First Amendment rights of those who work and/or volunteer at PRCs and want to save preborn babies and minister to women facing unplanned pregnancies. Specifically, this quashes our right to freely exercise our religiously informed views about what abortion does to mother and baby. These beliefs are shared by the vast majority of orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims.

The state has no business regulating speech it doesn’t like. Yet tyrants at the Illinois State Capitol passed SB 1909 and sent it to the Governor for his signature.

The Illinois Senate passed this bill on March 31^st by a vote of 36 to 19.

The Illinois House passed this bill on May 10^th by a vote of 72 to 40.

Click HERE to listen to this week’s IFA podcast in which Monte Larrick interviews Peter Breen.

Join us on Thursday, June 1st! You won’t want to miss hearing from Peter Breen and the plans to challenge this unconstitutional law in court as well as hear from our featured speaker, Ambassador Sam Brownback, who serves as chairman of the National Committee for Religious Freedom. He will report on the international situation in countries like China, Nicaragua, and Nigeria, as well as domestic attempts to eradicate religiously informed conscience rights for medical professionals and those working at pregnancy centers.

We will also be joined by Arielle Del Turco, Family Research Council’s Director of the Center for Religious Liberty and co-author of the organization’s “Hostility Against Churches” report. This new report “indicates that criminal acts against churches have been steadily on the rise for the past several years… The first three months of 2023 saw approximately 3x the number of acts of hostility perpetrated against churches compared to the same timeframe last year.

Religious liberty requires our vigilance because its degradation affects the exercise of every other constitutional right. Literally, our freedom is at stake.

“[T]hat the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain
the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy,
which at once destroys all religious liberty.” ~Thomas Jefferson, 1779.

For the last century, the United States of America has engaged in a great secular experiment: what if we pretended that God was irrelevant? What if we pretended that we could make laws that ignored God? Could the ‘public square’ be a place of free, rational discourse—free from claims about the implications of Christian theism on public life? This pretended neutrality has served to reveal one thing: that the line between secularism and paganism is dangerously thin. I’ll revisit that point later, but let’s first take a brief diversion into the hazy world of Cannabis and Constitutionalism.

The International Church of Cannabis (yes, you read that right) is in the midst of a battle with the city of Denver, Colorado, over what the ‘church’ claims to be its First Amendment rights to religious freedom. The battle began after the ‘church’ was ordered to remove an eleven-foot, bright pink statue that it erected on their property, a street corner in a residential area.

Striking, isn’t it? A religious group dedicated to smoking weed is appealing to the U.S. Constitution on the grounds of the First Amendment, an amendment designed to protect the Christian conscience. Now, without getting into debates about originalism versus living Constitutionalism, what does this tells us about the state of our nation? More than anything else, it indicates that the Constitution is no longer fit for the American people. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to put it the other way: the American people are no longer fit for the Constitution.

The Constitution has very little to say about God—it only mentions God indirectly, noting that the document was drafted ‘in the year of our Lord, 1787.’ While some might want to read this as a latent atheism in the Founders (or at least an etiolated deism), there is another way to explain the apparent lack of God. As John Adams famously said, “the Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people, and is wholly inadequate for any other.” That is to say, the Constitution presupposes widespread belief in God and the accompanying Christian social behaviors that stabilize a society.

Nevertheless, the lack of explicitly Christian language in the Constitution has been exploited as a ‘get out of morality free’ card by progressives for the last 150 years. And that’s just how we find the International Church of Cannabis appealing to their ‘Constitutionally-protected’ religious freedoms. Because our nation—Christians included—has gone along with the belief that the Constitution, and consequently all law, can exist and preserve social order without a Christian foundation, we now find ourselves confronted with open paganism.

Why is this the case? Why does a silent secularism end up manifesting itself as open paganism? Because nature abhors a vacuum. If there is a moral vacuum, something has to fill it. Man is homo adorans, he was created to worship something, so when God is stripped of his public relevance, the public will find other things to worship, like cannabis, or himself, or whatever that thing on the courthouse in New York is.

Secularism is never truly secular. There is always a god of the system. In a liberal democracy such as our own, the god is demos, the people. Just listen to any political pundit invoking Omniscient Polls and Almighty Consensus—such things are imbued with godlike characteristics, and everyone must fall down and worship before demos.

Christians must reclaim the public square, not ceding an inch to secularism. We must not buy into the notion that laws can be value-neutral. Law, morality, and social order have no rational basis other than the Triune God of Scripture.

In a free society, why should only one political side dominate the media? Yet social media, the networks, the cable channels, newspapers, and satellite programming are all completely dominated by the left. Recently, we saw quite a kerfuffle when DirecTV, owned by giant AT&T, decided to ignominiously drop Newsmax-TV from their lineup.

AT&T did the same a year ago to a much smaller conservative outlet, One America News (OAN). Why does it seem that the corporate decisions of companies like AT&T always push in only one political direction?

Numerous leaders have spoken against this censorship by the left against Newsmax, including:

• Dennis Prager
• Mike Huckabee
• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
• Speaker of the U.S. House Kevin McCarthy
• U.S. Senator Ted Cruz
• Actors Jon Voight and Kevin Sorbo

Many are calling for a boycott of DirectTV. Others are calling for Congressional hearings because of the potential impact on our political debate.

My big question is: Why must the left strangle what few conservative voices are heard on the other side?

When the founders of America produced the Constitution, a frequent criticism was that it did not spell out specific rights. So the founders agreed that if the Constitution were to be ratified, they would attach a Bill of Rights. These were the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution.

The First Amendment deals, first and foremost, with freedom of religion. But other rights enumerated there include the freedom of the press and free speech.

AT&T is a corporation. It is not a part of the government. But these companies wield a great deal of political power. Why are they using it to essentially stifle free speech?

There is no question that the mainstream media, the legacy media, the major networks, and so on present news from a skewed and biased perspective. National Public Radio (NPR), which receives government funding, has a program called “All Things Considered.” I remember whenever I would hear that title, I would think to myself—“Yeah, All Things Considered, from a leftist perspective.”

The founders envisioned a free society with a robust and free press. But today’s mainstream media is dominated by the leftist perspective, with only Fox News offering a significant counterweight.

Thankfully, even under dire conditions, there is always an alternative media. In the days of the American War for Independence, there were Committees of Correspondence, disseminating information to the 13 colonies contrary to royal-controlled sources.

There are different skirmishes in the battle over free speech, and some speech of more eternal significance than others. But let me use an analogy from the history of Christianity.

When the Apostles of Jesus set out to proclaim His saving message in first century Rome, the overwhelming power of the state was dead set against them. But God used them to eventually win over many converts. One of the ways was through letters that were written largely in prison.

Ultimately, there is a battle between good and evil, and the proclamation of the truth is often at the heart of that battle.

As the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” puts it, “Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong. Though [truth’s] portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong, yet that scaffold sways the future.” God is watching and making sure that truth will prevail, which it will—even if for a time, times, and a half a time, it suffers setbacks.

Of course, this is not to equate a commercial network like Newsmax with the Gospel. But it’s beyond question that elite interests often suppress truth wherever it comes from. I’m grateful to live at a time where there is readily available an alternative media. I’m sure if some elitists in our culture had their way, they would over-regulate the Internet, talk radio, satellite programming, Christian broadcasting, and so on, to make them essentially toothless—as sometimes happens in other countries.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter late last year, he suffered the ire of many on the left, as he opened up the Twitter files and exposed a great deal of censorship against conservative speech. Musk tweeted in late November: “This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”

Dr. Richard Land, president emeritus of the Southern Evangelical Seminary, said of the left’s censorship of conservative speech in general: “They want to enforce conformity, they do not want to hear viewpoints, they want to stifle viewpoints that they disagree with. They’re acting like fascist Blackshirts….They can only get away with taking away our rights if we let them.”

Indeed, must the left strangle the flow of information? As the Bible notes: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”

This article was originally published at Jerrynewcombe.com.

Religious Schools Can Get State Tuition Aid

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued a decisive victory for religious freedom and school choice this week in a 6-3 ruling in the Carson v. Makin case.

The case revolved around a Maine school-choice program that allowed parents to access taxpayer dollars for private school tuition. However, Maine attempted to prohibit parents from using the program to attend a religious school.

On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled that a Maine private-school-choice statute violated the First Amendment Free Exercise of Religion, writing:

“[T]here is nothing neutral about Maine’s program. The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools— so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion. A State’s antiestablishment interest does not justify enactments that exclude some members of the community from an otherwise generally available public benefit because of their religious exercise.”

In response to this important ruling, Kelly Shackelford, President, CEO, and Chief Counsel for First Liberty Institute said:

We are thrilled that the Court affirmed once again that religious discrimination will not be tolerated in this country. Parents in Maine, and all over the country, can now choose the best education for their kids without fearing retribution from the government. This is a great day for religious liberty in America.

Illinois Attorney General candidate David Shestokas celebrates the ruling as well, saying:

The Supreme Court affirmed this nation’s commitment to religious liberty in the case of Carson v. Makin. The court established a far reaching principle that when the government makes a benefit available it may not restrict the benefit based upon religion. While the case involved tuition assistance in schools, the principle established has the potential to extend across our civic life and keeps faith with the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the dissent. In the dissent, Breyer said the majority gave too little credence to the establishment clause and too much to the free exercise clause, saying:

The Court today pays almost no attention to the words in the first Clause while giving almost exclusive attention to the words in the second. The majority also fails to recognize the ‘play in the joints’ between the two Clauses.

Yet the Chief Justice’s majority opinion ended with these three sentences:

Maine’s nonsectarian requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program, said the chief justice, operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

This is not the first time the SCOTUS ruled to uphold the religious exercise clause regarding taxpayer tuition aid for religious schools. In its June 2020 decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the Court struck down a state scholarship program that excluded religious schools. And in 2017, the court found in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer that a church-owned playground can be eligible for a public benefit program.

Bottom line: The government should not discriminate against citizens who would choose to use their tuition-assistance for faith-based schools schools. Carson v. Makin is a victory not just for religious freedom but also for educational choice.

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a new case related to school prayer. This story began in 2015 when high school football Coach Joe Kennedy got on his knee at mid-field after a game and thanked God quietly. Some of the players voluntarily joined him in this huddle.

Kennedy was fired for this act by his employer, Bremerton High School in Bremerton, Washington. He sued to get his job back.

Fox News (4/25/22) reports: “Lower courts have all ruled for the school. The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals concluded that by kneeling and praying in view of students and parents, Kennedy ‘spoke as a public employee, not as a private citizen, and his speech therefore was constitutionally unprotected.’”

Fox News quotes Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State: “No child attending public school should have to pray to play school sports.” But his defenders note the coach was expressing his own public thanks—not forcing anyone else to participate in his prayer.

How dare he, argued the secular authorities in the state of Washington and beyond, acknowledge Almighty God before all those students and parents and members of the community?

How dare Coach Kennedy do this in the state named after George Washington, who acknowledged Almighty God on multiple occasions—even on the day be became our first president and participated in a two-hour Christian worship service with the new government leaders of the United States at St. Paul’s Chapel, in which they received Holy Communion?

Coach Kennedy is closer to the ideals and practices of the founders than his critics who assert a false “strict separation of church and state”—words found nowhere in the Constitution.

Coach Kennedy is being represented by First Liberty Institute based in Plano, Texas, which focuses on defending religious freedom in America. Their name is derived from the fact that the first liberty listed in our nation’s Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U. S. Constitution, is religious liberty.

The First Amendment begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Historically, this was understood to mean that there would no Church of America, like there is a Church of England. That is, there was to be no Church “by law established” at the federal level. Some states at the time had state-churches.

Defenders of Coach Kennedy argue that the same men who gave us the First Amendment also gave us the Northwest Ordinance, which spells out the template that future states in the country were to follow.

They wrote in this ordinance: “Religion and morality being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The founders did not intend schools to be “religion-free zones.”

Judge Darrell White, the president of Retired Judges of America, once told me in an interview on church-states relations: “There is a separation of church and state, but it’s not a separation of God and government.” It is a separation of the institution of the church from the institution of the state.

James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution, wrote a document called “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” in 1785. In that document, he notes that because Christianity is of divine origin, it will stand on its own, without the aid of the state.

Madison said, “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.”

In other words, the state is not to support the church and nor is the federal government (sometimes called by the founders the “general government”) to interfere with the church. Said Madison in 1788: “There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion.”

Just the idea of a school official bowing the knee to God—not bowing the knee to protest our national anthem, but in respect to our Creator—was enough for those on the left to try and destroy Coach Kennedy’s career and keep him from what he believes is his calling, to coach high school football.

It would seem that the left cares about free speech and freedom of expression when it comes to things the founders would have never dreamed about, like alternative sexualities and gender fluidity, but not for things explicitly protected in the U.S. Constitution like the free exercise of religion.

This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.

As incomprehensible to average Americans as it may seem, three stories about government school students facing disciplinary actions for expressing their Christian faith were featured in Christian media publications over the past few months:

• A six-year-old girl loves Jesus and is concerned about her second grade classmates’ eternities. She shares her newfound faith and it scares her friends. The Des Moines Washington teacher hears concerns from the classmates’ parents, and the little one finds her book bag searched everyday when she enters the schoolyard.

• A 14 year old student in Florida is ridiculed for reading his Bible at school. Not only did classmates reportedly threaten the boy on account of his faith, the high school freshman’s science teacher publicly questioned him and insinuated he was “ignorant” for believing in God and the Bible.

• Last year, yet another Florida high school student was reprimanded by her drama teacher for writing a monologue that referenced her faith in Jesus. The student was told to rewrite the assignment with no reference to religion.

Those are only three instances made public by legal groups representing the students who, their lawyers say, have had their First Amendment rights restricted in government schools.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

While the First Amendment focuses on the U.S. Congress and what they cannot do, it asserts that public policies restricting religious practice or expression at lower levels are not acceptable, either.

The 14-year-old Florida student whose teacher ridiculed him for his faith experienced something no American should ever have to experience, his attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement.

“It’s bad enough that the school has done nothing to stop the bullying from his peers, but have gone as far as joining in on targeting [the student] for simply practicing his faith. This blatant violation of his First Amendment rights is another example of how extreme so many in our education system have become,” Dhillon said, and why her law firm took on his case.

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which took on the 14-year-old drama student’s case, described a similar legal scenario.

“This is what ‘wokeness’ has come to—shaming middle school students for expressing their joy in their personal relationship with Jesus Christ because it is considered ‘offensive,’” Christina Compagnone (Stierhoff) of the ACLJ wrote in April 2021. “This was a clear violation of this student’s First Amendment rights and an affront to the religious liberties rooted deeply in the history and culture of the United States.”

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt with the First Amendment rights of students five decades ago, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). In their ruling favoring the plaintiffs, the highest court in the land wrote:

In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school, as well as out of school, are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views.

And while that’s a strong statement in favor of students’ rights to express their opinions, the question is whether the Court would hold a similar position in 2022, or would the Court decide that maintaining peace in a politically- and religiously-divided setting is the “greater good?”

A growing number of Christian parents are choosing home schools and private Christian schools rather than dealing with antagonistic settings and curriculum offered in state-operated schools.

As more and more cases like those hit Christian media headlines and eventually make it to dominant media, the more intense the issue will become and all the more urgent for American freedom-loving parents to defend future generations from anti-Christian sentiments within government schools.

Illinois Family Institute offers an array of resources on their website at illinoisfamily.org to help parents make crucial decisions about their children’s education.

Many Christians and non-Christians misunderstand the relationship between morality and religion. Many mistakenly believe that morality is the same thing as religion and, therefore, mistakenly believe that they should not advocate for policies that reflect their moral beliefs. But morals and religion are not the same, and basing our decisions on public policies, laws, or elections on beliefs that derive from religious convictions does not constitute an unconstitutional establishment of a state religion.

All laws reflect or embody someone’s morality. The moral beliefs of people who hold theistic worldviews are no less valid in the public square than the moral beliefs of those who hold atheistic worldviews—which, of course, are faith-based also. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was intended to prevent the establishment of a state religion, not to prevent religious beliefs from informing political decisions.

People from diverse faith traditions or no faith could all arrive at the same position on a particular public policy. For example, although Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Baptists, and atheists may all oppose abortion because they value human life, the reasons for that valuation of life differ. If there is a secular purpose for the law (e.g., to protect incipient human life), then voting for it does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The sources of the various parties’ desires to protect incipient life are not the concern of the government. It would be not only absurd but also unethical for the government to try to ascertain the motives and beliefs behind anyone’s opposition to abortion and even more unethical for the government to assert that only those who have no religious faith may vote on abortion laws. Such an assertion would most assuredly violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The religion clauses of the First Amendment were intended to protect religion from the intrusive power of the state, not the reverse. The Establishment Clause states that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” That does not mean religious convictions are prohibited from informing political values and decisions. To expect or demand that political decisions be divorced from personal religious beliefs is an untenable, unconscionable breach of the intent of the First Amendment which also includes the oft-neglected Free Exercise Clause which states that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

Legal theorist Michael Perry explains:

“[F]orcing religious arguments to be restated in other terms asks a citizen to ‘bracket’ religious convictions from the rest of her personality, essentially demanding that she split off a part of her self … to bracket [religious convictions] would be to bracket—indeed, to annihilate—herself. And doing that would preclude her—the particular person she is—from engaging in moral discourse with other members of society.”

To paraphrase Richard Neuhaus, that which is political is moral and that which is moral, for religious people, is religious. It is no less legitimate to have political decisions shaped by religion than by psychology, philosophy, scientism, or self-serving personal desire.

If allowing religious beliefs to shape political decisions represents a violation of the Establishment Clause and an inappropriate commingling of religion and government, then American history is rife with egregiously unconstitutional actions, for religious convictions have impelled some of our most significant social, political, and legal changes including the abolition of slavery, antiwar movements, opposition to capital punishment, and the passage of civil rights legislation.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is replete with references to his Christian faith which informed his belief about the inherent dignity, value, and rights of African Americans, a belief which he lost his life to see enshrined in law. He wrote what would now certainly generate howls of opposition:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.  To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

“Progressives” have no objection to people of faith participating in the democratic process so long as their views comport with “progressive” positions. Liberals never cried foul when Quakers or Catholics opposed the Vietnam war because of their religious convictions, and liberals do not object that Catholic opposition to the death penalty represents a violation of the “separation of church and state”–a phrase not found in the Constitution.

I don’t recall any “progressives” objecting when Senator Rob Portman and former president Barack Obama cited their religious beliefs in defense of their radical shifts in position on homosexual faux-marriage. Portman said,

The overriding message of love and compassion that I take from the Bible, and certainly the Golden Rule, and the fact that I believe we are all created by our maker, that has all influenced me in terms of my change on this issue.

After his flip-flop—er, “evolution” on faux-marriage, Obama, like Portman, cited the Bible as his justification:

When we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know? Treat others the way you’d want to be treated.

In contrast, when conservative people of faith participate in the political process, citing their religion as the source of their judgments, suddenly the Establishment Clause has been violated.

Apparently neither Portman nor Obama think much about what the Bible says about sex, marriage, or repentance. And apparently, neither Portman nor Obama understand the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule does not require Christians to affirm all the desires, beliefs, and actions of all humans. It requires Christians to treat others as they—disciples of Christ—want to be treated as disciples of Christ.

And what should disciples of Christ desire? They should desire to follow God’s teaching more closely every day. They should desire to be willing to die to self and to take up their crosses daily. They should want their brothers and sisters in Christ to hold them accountable for their embrace of sin.

What the government must not do is impose laws exclusively religious in nature like Sharia laws. There should be no laws requiring the observance of any particular religion. No laws governing baptismal practices or Communion. No laws requiring prayer or circumcision. But, for example, people whose faith points to the worth of all people may legitimately work toward enacting laws that oppose capital punishment, euthanasia, or abortion. People whose religious beliefs include pacifism may legitimately work toward preventing or stopping military engagements.

No one is legally, constitutionally, ethically, or morally obligated to divorce their faith from their political decisions.

Richard Neuhaus argues persuasively in his book The Naked Public Square that a polity denuded of religion will be clothed soon enough in some other system that functions as religion by providing “normative ethics.” A democratic republic cannot exist without objective normative ethics that render legitimate the delimitation or circumscription of individual rights.

Historically, the sources of the absolute, transcendent, objective, universal truths that render legitimate our legal system have been “the institutions of religion that make claims of ultimate or transcendent meaning.”

Neuhaus argues that when religion is utterly privatized and eliminated as a “source of transcendence that gives legitimate and juridical direction and form, something else will necessarily fill the void, and that force will be the state.”

If the body politic claims there are no absolutes or delegitimizes religion as an arbiter of right and wrong, or good and evil, then the state will fill the vacuum, relativizing all values, and rendering this relativization absolute.

Lawmaking absent an understanding that there exist moral truths that are objective and universal would represent an illegitimate and hubristic arrogation of power.

What sense does outrage at human rights violations make if we assert there are no universal, transcendent, eternal, objective truths? And if we agree that these truths exist, that they transcend the subjective opinions of any particular individual, then what is their source other than a supernatural, eternal, transcendent being?

There are numerous factors that have resulted in a diminished valuation or recognition of the essential place of a belief in God as the source of transcendent truth in American society and politics, one of which is our remarkable cultural diversity. A healthy respect for the pluralism in America, however, need not and should not degenerate into what retired Campbell University law professor Lynn R. Buzzard describes as a “religion of secularism, excluding religion from participation in the pluralism.”

Princeton University law professor Robert George explains that our cultural degradation has, at least in part, resulted from an “orthodox secularism [that] stands for the strict absolute separation of not only church and state, but also faith and public life.”

Allowing religious institutions and ideas to inform our understanding of right and wrong, which is a necessary precursor to making legislative and juridical decisions, does not represent a violation of the Establishment Clause. Indeed, as Samuel Silver explains, “The government, as defined by the First Amendment and explained by its author James Madison, must remain neutral between various sects of religion, but it is not required to remain neutral between religion and irreligion.”

Prohibiting religiously derived understandings of right and wrong to shape political decisions, would, however, represent a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Buzzard writes that “Free Exercise will not be construed as merely creating a zone of non-governmental interference or the creation of an exemption from conscience-opposed activity, but the opportunity to be full partners in the pluralism of our day.”

To leftists, the idea of a separation of church and state no longer points to the importance of protecting religious freedom from the intrusive power of the state but instead refers to coercively eradicating theologically orthodox religious expression from the public square. Only secular or theologically heterodox worldviews, which are as shaped by myopic, dogmatic, unproved assumptions as secularists claim theologically orthodox religious worldviews are, will be tolerated in our pretend-tolerant society.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Do-Christians-Regularly-Violate-the-Separation-of-Church-and-State.mp3

Written by Don Alltoada

Media networks are powerful opinion setters. Still, for a reason, most people have deep distrust in newsmakers. Since their outset, press and radio were brought into play for political propaganda.

The first use of the term “mass media” dates back to 1923. It appeared in the columns of the magazine “Advertising and Selling” and referred to the “most economical way” to spread, in no time, its message to all target market groups.

The initial definition had an advertising focus, most likely due to the development that the same year of the first American radio network in Boston. The concept directed to the public was plain and simple – mass communication for mass consumption.

The postulate was further refined by Harold Lasswell. In his book “Propaganda Technique in the World War”, published in 1927, he described his “hypodermic needle model”, known also as the “hypodermic-syringe model”, “transmission-belt model”, or “magic bullet” theory. This is a model of communication suggesting that an intended message is directly received and entirely accepted by the receiver.

The model got rooted in the 1930s behaviorism and had fallen into obsolescence for some time, but big data analytics-based mass customization has led to the revival of the initial idea behind it.

Four decades later, in 1964, the concept was deepened by Marshall McLuhan in his book “Understanding Media.” According to McLuhan, cinema, television, the press and radio are “mass media” because they have the same characteristics: one-way communication, one-sidedness of the message, undifferentiation and linearity of information.

In his views, the mass media – a Marxist concept that globalists and neosocialists will strive to revive after the election of President Biden – would contribute to a happy “global village” by catalyzing a common culture of “micro-societies.”

That credulous reading was opposed by leading intellectuals of the 20^th century. In their macro-perception and analysis of mass media, the main fear, fully justified we may say today, was the increased facility to submerge people and nations with propaganda messages. The “global village” turned to be everything but a “happy” one.

The meticulous and systematic application of the “magic bullet theory” transpires from the reporting practices of CNN and the New York Times. By targeting audiences with carefully crafted inaccuracies or half-true messages, they denigrate or enhance, at their ease, in line with their prevailing political inclination and leftist ideology.

CNN and the NYT lost it on the central tenet of journalism: objectivity and reliability of information. It is a false claim to argue that President Trump was the central disrupter in modern media; his presidency coincided with deep and rapid changes in society and technology that reshaped the concept of neutral journalism.

The only profession mentioned in the U.S. Constitution is the press. It has long been seen as essential to democratic governance. Free speech, enshrined in the First Amendment, is one of the bulwarks of individual liberty and equality. This has not always included the perception of impartiality and objectivity. In the 18th and 19th century, in fact, most newspapers were often aggressively partisan.

Today, standards are different and journalism is attacked for not being balanced. At the same time, the idea of nonpartisan journalism is fading away. With the sharp polarization of the American society, news corporations opt for returning to their vigorous and confrontational ways of the past.

Still, in doing so, they must abide to ethical principles and deontological objectivity. The existing legislation must be adapted to the evolving media environment. More than the hackneyed “protecting democracy” pretext, this time it is a question of protecting the freedoms of U.S. citizens from misleading public opinion influencers.

Because of the large erosion of trust in the media, mainstream news corporations face new credibility risks in terms of public opinion. CNN and the NYT handled a wide-ranging backlash for being unprofessional on a number of occasions and in the last five years they just flushed what remained of their reputation down the toilet.

For instance, CNN was forced to retract a story on its website that claimed the Senate was investigating links between a Russian bank and a close ally of Trump. The network apologized and three high-ranking CNN journalists resigned.

The New York Times, too, had to correct an editorial and apologize for incorrectly linking a map produced by Sarah Palin’s political action committee to the 2011 shooting of U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords (D-AZ)

The Associated Press has issued corrections as well for its coverage of the Russian election meddling story.

CNN has been the subject of allegations of party bias and disparate treatment of Republican and Democratic candidates during the last two presidential primaries.

In October 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from John Podesta which showed CNN contributor Donna Brazile passing the questions for a CNN-sponsored debate to the Clinton campaign. In the email, Brazile discussed her concern about Clinton’s ability to field a question regarding the death penalty. The following day Clinton received the question about the death penalty, verbatim, from an audience member at the CNN-hosted Town Hall event. According to a CNNMoney investigation, debate moderator and CNN contributor Roland Martin “did not deny sharing information with Brazile”.

During the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries debate moderated by CNN and the Des Moines Register on 14 January 2020, CNN faced controversy and criticism from media pundits and the public alike over what many saw as blatant bias for centrist candidates as well as a CNN article some journalists believe to be a manufactured hit piece intended to depict Bernie Sanders as a misogynist prior to the debate followed by a series of adversarial and loaded questions during the debate itself regarding the anonymously sourced story.

On 10 January 2017, CNN reported on the existence of classified documents that said Russia had compromising personal and financial information about then President-elect Donald Trump. CNN did not publish the dossier, or any specific details of the dossier.

Later that day, BuzzFeed published the entire 35-page dossier with a disclaimer that it was unverified and “includes some clear errors”. The dossier had been read widely by political and media figures in Washington, and had been sent to multiple other journalists who had declined to publish it as it was unsubstantiated.

On 26 June 2017, three network investigative journalists; Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris, resigned from CNN over a false story, later retracted, that connected Anthony Scaramucci to a US $10 billion Russian investment fund. The network apologized to Scaramucci and stated that the online story did not meet their editorial standards.

The Washington Post fact-checked a CNN report regarding Trump on 8 December 2017: CNN ran a story that claimed two sources told the network that the Trump campaign received an email that gave Trump and his son Don, Jr., early access to WikiLeaks documents on 4 September 2016. The Washington Post, did obtain the email, which showed that the CNN information was wrong and CNN was forced to issue a correction of their story.

What is more, the case of the former UN high official Frank LaRue proves the impossible moral equilibrium for CNN and the NYT of preaching and delivering ethically on the same subject.

Four months ago, the Liberty Sentinel reported that Fundamedios, a human rights organization committed to protecting journalists and combating misinformation, elected as Chairman of its Board of Directors in the United States a sex offender that was sacked from UNESCO in 2018. Yet, Frank La Rue’s biography on its website makes no mention of his previous role at UNESCO or how he lost it.

La Rue was booted out of his senior UN post in February 2018 after the Daily Mail revealed ‘MeToo’-style allegations that he sexually harassed and aggressed a woman working with him. His job at the UN was to promote freedom of expression globally as ‘fundamental’ to democracy. Yet after being marched out of UNESCO’s headquarters, he lodged a formal complaint about the press finding out about it and claimed some US $160,000 in “damages for injury to his reputation” against UNESCO, accusing the UN agency of disclosing information about him. His claim was dismissed.

As also revealed by the Liberty Sentinel, among the Fundamedios Board of U.S. advisors appear two major leftist media duly represented for CNN by Fernando del Rincón and by Boris Muñoz for the New York Times. Working with Frank La Rue did not create any moral discomfort to both. At the same time, a CNN webpage is specifically devoted to allegations of sexual impropriety. You can read there:

“Since 2016, dozens of high-profile men have been accused of sexual misconduct, harassment or assault (…).The list of accused men includes key figures across politics, news media and entertainment. (…) Some have lost their jobs. Others have not”. 

Frank LaRue is not included in the CNN list. Instead, he is considered as a reliable partner by CNN and the NYT. Demonstrably, the sexual misconduct of LaRue is not a problem for their unethical corporations.

Following the publications in the press revealing the scandal, Fundamedios removed immediately Frank La Rue from his position. The organization kept him however as Director for Advocacy and Human Rights. When he got the Chairmanship, Fundamedios issued a press release announcing his election. We have seen none on his ejection.

Our attempts to obtain a comment from Fundamedios prior to the publication of this article did not bear result. Their email address in the USA is not operational, and neither is the telephone line in Washington DC provided for contact on their webpage.

The main question that remained unanswered was how would Fundamedios describe the reasons for conferring responsibility for Advocacy and Human Rights to a sexual harasser, with proven misconduct that led to his sacking from UNESCO?

Both leftist media CNN and the NYT are still involved with Fundamedios and find no ethical problem to cooperate with an organization in which the responsibility for human rights is conferred to a sexual offender. Once more, CNN and the NYT were caught on the spot preaching for greater morality but doing exactly the opposite.

* * * * *

With CNN and the NYT irreversibly damaging reporting standards, the main battle for press and media is to remain consequential in the context of increasing public mistrust. Nowadays, too often, cases of corruption and other unlawful deeds disclosed by the press are judiciary ignored, and perpetrators feel free and nonchalantly unaccountable.

The banalization of reporting political scandals and financial scheming represents a serious risk for journalism at a time when thousands of news reports are aired per minute, every single hour of the day. If that continues, journalistic work will become inconsequential and journalism will turn into a business like any other business – profit oriented and money dependent.

The American media ecosystem has become saturated with misinformation and noise because the press remains committed to a set of norms that are ill-adapted to the digital age. That makes it easy for bad-faith actors to get away with pushing falsehoods.

It the digital era, evolvements in the media landscape are unpredictable. The unexpected move by Facebook this week to block news access in Australia was unimaginable only weeks ago. The retaliatory move blocked Australians from sharing news stories, escalating a fight with the government over whether powerful tech companies should have to pay news organizations for content. Facebook acted after the House of Representatives passed legislation that would make it and Google pay for Australian journalism. The decision of Mark Elliot Zuckerberg also blocked some government communications, including messages about emergency services. What’s happening in Australia today may become a precedent for other countries as governments revamp laws to catch up with the fast-changing digital world.

Unmistakably, the “cyberspaced” world is entering a phase where the future of reporting is going to be based on consumers view on whether a story is worth enough to pay for it, by subscribing or subsidizing. The job of reporters will be to a greater extent to provide guideposts for people who have too much information in front of them at every moment of their life.

Because of social media devouring humans’ brains, the viability of journalism is already in a weakened condition. The risk is that journalism can destroy itself from within, if its standards keep being lowered so as to fit the minimal media reading skills of the general public. A new generation of citizens will be formatted according to such new media paradigms and the fundamental freedoms of people will be again at risk.

This article was originally published by Liberty Sentinel.

As I have long argued, the greatest threat posed to our First Amendment assembly, speech, and religious free exercise protections comes from the homosexual community and the “trans” cult. Already state laws and judicial decisions have been eroding those protections, and last Thursday, the most dangerous threat yet emerged in Congress when U.S. Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) re-introduced the deceitfully titled “Equality Act,” which explicitly neuters religious protections when religious beliefs conflict with disordered sexual desires.

The Equality Act (H.R. 5) would add “sexual orientation” (i.e., homosexuality) and “gender identity” (i.e., cross-sex impersonation) to the current list of bases on which discrimination is prohibited in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Doing so is a means of abrogating 1. the right of free people to express moral judgments about volitional acts, 2. the right of people of faith to exercise their religion freely with regard to beliefs on sexuality, and 3. the right to recognize the scientific reality of sex differences in those places where sex differences matter most.

When leftists say that the Equality Act will protect “LGBTQ” persons from discrimination, they mean the Equality Act will prohibit conservative people from making decisions in accordance with their beliefs—including religious beliefs—about marriage, volitional sexual acts, and cross-sex impersonation. In other words, if the Equality Act passes, a new protected class based on or constituted by disordered subjective sexual feelings will be created and our first freedom will be abrogated.

The Equality Act, which has 223 co-sponsors—all Democrats—is supposed to be voted on this week after which it will move to the U.S. Senate. President Biden is urging Congress to pass it with all due haste, so he—the self-identifying Catholic—can sign into law the bill that will undermine religious protections for Catholics and Protestants.

The Equality Act makes clear the sweeping nature of the cultural changes leftists seek to impose via federal legislation.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer … people commonly experience discrimination in securing access to public accommodations—including … senior centers … health care facilities, shelters …  youth service providers including adoption and foster care providers. … Forms of discrimination include the exclusion and denial of entry, unequal or unfair treatment. … (with respect to gender identity) an individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.

If this legislation passes, no senior center, health care facility, shelter, or adoption agency that partners with the federal government or receives federal money will be permitted to treat biological men who pretend to be women as men.

Shelters, senior centers, and hospitals with sex-segregated restrooms, showers, or sleeping quarters will be forced to sexually integrate those private spaces.

Catholic hospitals will be forced to perform surgical mutilations on men and women who seek to pass as the sex they are not.

Christian adoption and foster care providers will be forced to place infants, children, and teens in the homes of homosexuals and cross-sex impersonators.

Teachers in government schools will be forced to facilitate delusional “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices. Administrators, faculty, and staff will be required by law to use incorrect pronouns, which constitutes bearing false witness. And locker room supervisors will be forced to oversee students of the opposite sex undressing.

The Equality Act poses some as of yet unacknowledged ideological and pragmatic problems for Democrats. For example, on the same day Cicilline reintroduced the Equality Act, U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-NY) reintroduced her bill that seeks to protect girls and women in refugee camp bathrooms. Meng explained,

Refugee camps should be safe havens for those who have been forced to flee their countries and that includes secure facilities for restrooms. … But unfortunately, many bathrooms in refugee camps do not provide appropriate safety protections. Many refugee camps lack adequate access to such facilities and often times the restrooms are mixed-sex, public, and without locks. … These conditions create a lack of privacy and dignity and make women and girls afraid to use the restrooms, fearing that they may be assaulted and subjected to violence while using the bathroom. These types of conditions are unacceptable. Nobody should have their safety jeopardized in order care for their most basic hygiene needs. My bill would finally combat this problem. (emphasis added)

David Cicilline is a co-sponsor of Meng’s bill, which means that Cicilline is the co-sponsor of a bill that prohibits mixed-sex bathrooms in federal refugee camps and the sponsor of a bill that mandates mixed-sex bathrooms in all federally funded facilities.

Oh, what tangled webs …

The Equality Act also includes the following:

A single instance of discrimination may have more than one basis. For example, discrimination against a married same-sex couple could be based on the sex stereotype that marriage should only be between heterosexual couples, the sexual orientation of the two individuals in the couple, or both.

Leftists define the belief that marriage is the union of two people of opposite sexes as a discriminatory “sex stereotype,” and they want to legally prohibit every American from acting in accordance with that belief. Of course, the leftist opinion that the cross-cultural and historical understanding of marriage is a discriminatory sex stereotype is neither an objective fact nor true. It is an ideological assumption.

As an end run around the First Amendment’s religious protection, the anti-constitutional, anti-liberty, anti-Christian, perversity-supremacy law—misnamed the Equality Act—states,

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 … shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.

Anticipating appeals to equality for people of faith, who are currently protected by both the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, the tyrants behind the Religious Bigotry Act Equality Act made sure that people of faith lose.

As I wrote two years ago,

The Equality Act would require that federal law recognize disordered subjective feelings and deviant behaviors as protected characteristics. Federal law would absurdly recognize homoeroticism and cross-sex masquerading as conditions that must be treated like race and biological sex, which are objective, 100 percent heritable conditions that are in all cases immutable, and carry no behavioral implications.

Once the law is enjoined to protect two groups based on their subjective sexual feelings and volitional sexual behaviors, we open a Pandora’s Box of evils that will inevitably result in conflicts between the new legal rights of those who embrace sexual deviance as “identity” and 1. the First Amendment rights of those who reject sexual deviance, 2. the moral right of businesses to require restrooms, locker rooms, and showers to correspond to biological sex, 3. the right of businesses to fire or refuse to hire a person who chooses to masquerade as the opposite sex, and 4. the right of public schools to fire or to refuse to hire a person who chooses to impersonate the opposite sex.

If the Equality Act passes, all it will take for other groups to have their sexual peccadillos deemed “sexual orientations,” is to organize and wait for the culture to do its dirty work.

Academia will jump aboard first, squawking in newly invented jargon and intellectual-ese about identity, authenticity, equity, tolerance, diversity, bigotry, hatred, and phobias.

Then the “arts,” will join in writing plays, novels, Hollywood scripts, and heartstring-pulling songs affirming all sorts of perverse sexual fetishes as authentic “identities.”

Next our polluted and politicized professional mental health and medical communities will manufacture “social science” studies to show how much happier polyamorists are when they are free to live in poly-pods without shaming judgments; and that brothers in love should be permitted to marry (after all, love is love); and that adults who identify as babies should be free to wear onesies to work in order to be their authentic selves, after which all of society will be  forced to ask our friends, neighbors, co-workers, and students what their preferred age is.

Christians will be legally prohibited from acting on their moral judgments about sexual perversion, and dissenters will be “othered,” cancelled, and shamed. Soon Christian-shaming will be the only shaming permitted in this brave new world where shame is unmoored from morality.

Americans are a tolerant and patient people, but their capacity for tolerating unjust oppression and suppression of their most fundamental rights is not unlimited. I suspect Pelosi, Schumer et al. realize that. I suspect they know that the radical anti-American, anti-liberty, anti-Constitution, anti-Christianity, Big Brother-esque agenda they have planned for Americans in the next four years may spark a rebellion. Hence the razor-topped wall surrounding the “people’s” house.

But, razor-topped barbed wire cannot keep standing a house divided against itself.

Take ACTION: (UPDATED) Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative our U.S. Senators to urge him/her them to oppose the federal Equality Act (H.R. 5) which seeks to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections for an individual’s perceived sex, “sexual orientation,” or “gender identity.” If you know the name of your local official, you can also call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask the operator to connect you with his/her office to leave a message.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/audioThe-Equality-Act-Will-Lay-Waste-to-This-Already-Divided-House_01.mp3

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Written by Greg Burt

Joe Biden has announced his intent to nominate California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But Becerra raises deep concerns among religious conservatives fighting to protect their First Amendment free speech and religious liberty rights. They are leary of Becerra because he defended the anti-free speech California law (AB 775), struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, that forced pro-life care centers to promote state-sponsored abortions. They are also alarmed over comments he made before the state Assembly three years ago when he said religious liberty is only for “individuals,” not “institutions.”

California Family Council President Jonathan Keller had this to say about the nomination. “On November 7, Joe Biden claimed victory in the presidential race, saying ‘we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy.’ But his nomination of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services raises grave concerns,” Keller said. “The Secretary of HHS is one of the most important positions in the federal government. But Mr. Becerra is a radical ideologue who rejects First Amendment protections for religious organizations, even earning a rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s hard to see how nominating such an activist is consistent with Mr. Biden’s pledge to be a president for all Americans.”

Becerra made his views on religious liberty known in response to questions from California Assemblyman James Gallagher during his confirmation hearing for California Attorney General on January 10, 2017. Gallagher asked Becerra what he thought about AB 775 and another proposed bill, SB 1146, which would have forced religious universities to change their housing policies and moral behavior codes to avoid punishment.

“On religious protections, the protection for religion is for the individual,” Becerra explained.  “I think it is important to distinguish between protections that you are affording to the individual to exercise his or her religion freely, versus protections you are giving to some institution or entity who is essentially bootstrapping the first amendment protections on behalf of somebody else.”

Gallagher took great exception to Becerra’s statement saying it reflected a “fundamental misunderstanding of the freedom of religion and freedom of association.” Gallagher expressed his objections on the floor of the State Assembly when he explained why he opposed Becerra’s nomination as California’s next Attorney General.

“The freedom of religion and the First Amendment applies just as much to the mosque as it does to the Muslim; it applies just as much to the gurdwara as it does to the Sikh; it applies just as much to the church as it does to the Christian,” Gallagher said.  “It applies just as much to religious non-profits, universities, and places of education. Their religious rights need to be protected just as much.”

Watch the full Gallagher/Becerra exchange here.

This article was originally published at CaliforniaFamily.org.

One of the many remarkable aspects of this time in America is that all the forces of oppression about which George Orwell warned in his novel 1984 are present and growing, and many of the oppressors can’t see it. Ironically, many of the oppressors view themselves as paragons of virtue when, in reality, they’re paragons of virtue-signaling, which constitutes a performative cloak of invisibility that conceals their totalitarianism.

In Orwell’s portentous novel, he describes four government ministries, one of which—the Ministry of Truth—“concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.” Orwell wrote,

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ … All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

While our news, entertainment, education, and fine arts are not institutionally linked to the government, they are ideologically bound together in an unholy alliance that seeks to indoctrinate society just as Big Brother does in 1984.

Today “progressives” are tearing down statues and renaming government schools to erase recognition of our Founding Fathers. Government schools are teaching the revisionist history of the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States.

Through falsified birth certificates and drivers’ licenses, the state colludes with mainstream news outlets, entertainment, and educational institutions to scrub history by identifying men and women as the sex they aren’t. Try looking for information on the actress Ellen Page. Within hours of Page’s recent announcement that she was no longer a woman, the disparate minions in the Ministry of Truth began scrubbing history, changing “Ellen” to “Elliot” and replacing all pronouns that refer to her with deceitful male pronouns.

Acts of hatred and deceit against the human person are now called “love” and “authenticity” by those practiced at the art of Newspeak.

Orwell wrote, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

It’s happening now, and it is terrifying, indeed. Now we have intrusive Big Government—including government schools—in cahoots with Big Tech to control the past, the present, and the future. Social media has created algorithms and inconsistently applied “community standards” to suppress the dissemination of not only ideas but also news.

Orwell explains that in the government-mandated language of Newspeak, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” When I worked at Deerfield High School, two English teachers, Michael Wolf and Jeff Berger-White, sent a letter to the local press which was signed by half the department in which they argued,

It is difficult for … people … to simultaneously hold conflicting opinions. But this difficulty should not prevent us from attempting to do so. The best work we do in our classrooms is to highlight how multiple understandings are true, and that the validity of one idea does not necessarily negate the validity of another.

I’m pretty sure they read 1984 but seemed to have missed the point.

In their letter, they acknowledged that “certain doctrine” that “may not allow diverse and conflicting views to coexist” still have a “cherished place” in their classrooms—unless those doctrine are “malicious.” Guess which views on sexuality the gods of government schools have declared malicious.

The vehicle for our rocketing trip deep down into our subterranean Orwellian dystopia is “trans”-cultism. The world we’ve entered is the anti-science Transtopia where, in Orwell’s words, “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” The propellant that reality-denying “trans”-cultists and their fearful and/or foolish collaborators use is Newspeak.

Newspeak, like the speech rules leftists impose today, is intended to control thought:

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings. … [T]he special function of certain Newspeak words. … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.

In two now-famous quotes, Orwell illuminates the troubling views of tyrants about language:

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

On December 8, 2020, the University of Michigan’s Information and Technology Services’ “Words Matter Task Force”—Ministry of Truth for short—issued its spanking new Newspeak lexicon. Acknowledging that “language is powerful,” the Ministers of Truthiness have published a document with banned words and “recommended” replacements along with a bewildering array of action steps to ensure widespread compliance. The banned list—which is “not exhaustive and will continue to grow”—are those words deemed by the Ministers of Truthiness (aka Thought Police) to “harm morale, and deliberately or inadvertently exclude people from feeling accepted” or “cause people to feel alienated.”

Here are a few of the alienating terms (left column) and their “recommended” Newspeakian replacements (right column):

I don’t know how fans of Masters of the Universe are going to feel about Primaries of the Universe.

This list reveals that the left is teaching people to be offended in order to maintain their cultural power through intersectional-identity grievance politics. My anecdotal experience with even leftists suggests virtually no one has been offended by most of these expressions as they are commonly used until the last five minutes of history. And the faux-offense now being asserted didn’t arise naturally. It had to be beaten into them by the hammer of tolerance wielded by far-left social justice warriors.

It also raises a question for leftists: If a word’s history is largely unknown and its current meaning is inoffensive, why eliminate it? Why not be thankful that the old ugly association has been supplanted by a new innocuous one?

If, on the other hand, we must commit to linguistic stasis, then shouldn’t we retain the historical meaning of, for example, pronouns?

And what if I’m offended by being commanded to use pronouns based on “gender identity” rather than on biological sex?  What if, because I’m deeply committed to science, reality, truth, and the First Amendment, I’m offended by attempts to socially coerce language compliance in the service of a political agenda?

Orwell wrote that “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” Yep, that pretty much describes what 16+ years of secular education does to children.

Under an article about the University of Michigan’s Ministry of Truth on the College Fix website, one waggish fellow left this perfect response to the banned words list:

Every member of the Words Matter Task Force has sold his or her ideals down the river. This black-and-white thinking only ever leads to blacklists, and shunning people off the reservation while the crazies enjoy a crippled picnic. To be thrown under the bus for being the low man on the social-justice totem pole is to be grandfathered into the ever-growing community of gypped guys and gals, excluded when the masters change the rules of polite society into one of a dummy society where every utterance is weighed for a privileged account. Even asking for a sanity check of these lunatic brown-baggers puts you at risk of being professionally, if not personally, disabled. They may start by cracking the whip rhetorically, but their rhetoric inevitably leads to insane physical realities sooner or later.

In short, kiss my grits, sweetie.

Remember this list next time you see the leftist American Library Association’s annual umbrage-fest called Banned Books Week. Leftists ban not only books, but also words.

Orwell said something else “progressives” will hate:

Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

Written by Lathan Watts

When those entrusted with power to protect the God given rights of the people do so selectively, arbitrarily picking and choosing which freedoms are worthy of protection and to what extent, then we are no longer a nation governed by the rule of law but by the whims of men.

President Abraham Lincoln once observed,

“Nearly all men can stand the test of adversity, but if you really want to test a man’s character give him power.”

America now faces of a convergence of calamities unlike any our nation has dealt with in nearly a century. Amidst the confusion, what has become clear is the character of those in power is being tested and some are found as lacking in character as in their understanding of the U.S. Constitution.

From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic we heard government officials at every level repeat some version of the mantra “the first priority of government is protecting the health and safety of the citizens.” The first priority, in fact the justification for the existence of government, is to protect the God-given rights of the people.

For example, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy when asked by Fox News host Tucker Carlson how he could justify the arrest of 15 men attending the funeral of a Rabbi replied,

“That’s above my paygrade Tucker, I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this…”

Of course, government is charged with protecting the health and safety of the citizens but it must be done, as all government action, within the parameters of the Constitution. First Liberty Institute and our volunteer attorney network have taken elected officials to court all over the country to hold them to this standard.

What has also become clear is how some in government and the media are willing to demand constitutional protections be enforced or abandoned depending on the subject matter. When business owners peacefully assembled to protest against the government imposed lockdown they were called everything from “selfish” to “domestic terrorists” and accused of valuing money over the lives of others.

When protests over the death of George Floyd broke out in cities across the country, no such concern over public health could be heard. It was exactly the opposite response. Over 1000 public health professionals signed on to a letter specifically calling for governments not to use concern over the spread of COVID 19 to stop protest marches and other demonstrations:

“However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.” (emphasis added)

The last sentence of that letter means either the virus can distinguish between protestors based on the issue they’re protesting or these public health officials care more about virtue signaling and adherence to political ideology than the public health.

Any American with a modicum of morality and respect for justice in a civil society was appalled at what happened to George Floyd. That same sense of morality and respect for justice is what causes many to recoil at the sight of violent arsonists and thieves masquerading as protestors attempting to cloak their crimes in lawful activity.

Yet CNN anchor Chris Cuomo saw no conflict between the two,

“Now too many see the protests as the problem. No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets: persistent, poisonous inequities and injustice, and please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful…”

One hopes someone showed him the text of the First Amendment which protects the “right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

The beauty of the First Amendment is in its protection of all religion, speech, press, peaceful assemblies equally, without any regard to the popularity of the ideas. If our republic is to survive we must hold ourselves and those we entrust with power to the same principled standard.

This article was originally published at FirstLiberty.org.

Written by Jeremy Dys
Special Counsel for Litigation and Communications, First Liberty

We did not suddenly arrive to the moment where riot police arrest CNN journalists. Though the issues may be complex, recent history suggests that the suppression of civil rights—even for a pandemic—leads inexorably to the abuse of other core freedoms by the government.

Until recently, several states—including Minnesota—declared that it was unlawful to engage in the free exercise of religion in groups of ten or more. When churches dared pursue legal recourse to correct that issue, politicians, pundits and journalists offered criticism.

As one of the attorneys on the receiving end of that criticism on more than one occasion, it left me perplexed. “What’s the big deal?” they might say, “Why can’t churches just worship online?!

The answer should be obvious to any with a passing appreciation for the First Amendment. Our U.S. Constitution guarantees the “free exercise of religion” and the “right of the people peaceably to assemble.” In other words, those with a divine mandate to meet together in worship—regardless of the religion in which they participate—should not require the permission of the state to do so, nor may those rights be treated as lesser rights to visiting retail, restaurants or hardware stores. There is no pandemic exception to the U.S. Constitution.

Because we have (for now) survived the political left’s vision for the lesser “freedom to worship,” we ought to appreciate the free exercise of religion all the more. State officials are not immune from brutal and corrupt behavior. Indeed, the very reason we have a First Amendment is to guard against the natural aggression of power toward that which challenges a state’s authority.

The last three months reveal that too many state and local officials often resist that limitation on their power. The truth serum embedded in the coronavirus appears to be that it reveals the lust for power dormant in many public officials. They believe it within their power to, like a light switch, turn civil rights on or off as they see fit.

If that is the view of some state officials, as we have seen in New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and others, then there can be no surprise whatsoever that other state officials would place journalists—also unequivocally protected by the First Amendment—under arrest.

Of course, this fundamentally disagrees with the central message of our Bill of Rights: The rights articulated therein belong to, and remain with, the people by virtue of their humanity. The limited rights of government—what the people empower government to do—are articulated in the body of the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights make plain what the people refused to permit the government to govern. Together, this works to restrain government and ensure freedom.

If you have been inclined to roll your eyes over citizens insisting upon their religious liberty just to sit in a car at a drive-in church service, remember that part of what they seek to prevent is what we now see in the detention of four CNN journalists. Religious people, lately held in contempt by some for simply wishing to exercise their religion at a safe social distance, are actually doing their part to preserve everyone’s freedom.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey should understand this by now. When the threat of litigation by the Roman Catholic Church and Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod forced Governor Tim Walz to recognize that churches could safely meet in-person at a bare 25 percent capacity, Mayor Frey declared the idea to be, “a recipe in Minneapolis for a public health disaster.” Frey went on to suggest to CNN that religious people may be less capable of social distancing than shoppers at the Mall of America. They should stay in their virtual worship services, you see, for their own good lest these religious people infect us all.

Four days later and Mayor Frey’s office is handing out free face masks to those engaged in a form of free speech (and worse)—in groups quite larger than ten—while the police take members of the free press into custody.

Being “all in this together” means that, whether we agree or disagree, we each do our part to insist that our civil rights are secured—even in the midst of a pandemic or panic. Without that commitment, the erosion of our civil rights—and our very freedom—is where it leads.

This article was originally published online on Newsweek on June 1, 2020.

Written by Jorge Gomez

The greatest threat to America is not the COVID-19 virus.

We don’t dismiss the deadliness of a rapidly spreading illness. However, the virus itself isn’t the most pressing threat to the fabric or the foundations of our country.

The most imminent danger to our republic is the overreach of government power, especially during a crisis. Our nation faces a fatal risk when government takes actions that violate our fundamental freedoms, leading us down the road of tyranny, to the erosion of our constitutional system.

When we survey the landscape of stay-at-home orders and restrictions imposed during the last several weeks, we see officials in numerous states abusing their authority to severely cut back freedoms, as they don’t want to let “a good crisis go to waste.”

Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the burdensome policies, bigotry and discrimination directed against America’s houses of worship and religious communities.

Churches and people of faith nationwide have largely shown love for their neighbor, complied with health guidelines, gone the extra mile to adapt their religious services and continued serving communities as their faith teaches. Even still, relentless and outrageous violations of their religious freedom are constantly launched against them.

What does this say about the state of our nation?

One thing is increasingly clear. The attacks on our First Freedom during the health crisis are a warning sign that America is facing a constitutional crisis.

Downgrading America’s First Freedom to Second Class Status

The first indication that the U.S. Constitution is in deep trouble comes from data showing that most Americans think it’s okay to maintain ongoing limitations on religious liberty.

A recent University of Chicago Divinity School / Associated Press poll reported that 42 percent of Americans think in-person religious services should be allowed with restrictions, and 48 percent think they should not be allowed at all.

That’s half of Americans who believe churches should be banned from meeting, even if they follow the same restrictions and all safety protocols as businesses, retail, liquor and other stores which are allowed to be open. That’s pure discrimination.

Let’s ask ourselves a difficult question: Have we elevated commercial activity so high on our list of “essential services” and downgraded religious freedom to second tier, or even further down the list?

Are we at a point now when we’re categorizing this First Freedom as “non-essential?”

This reveals something deeply concerning about our understanding of basic constitutional freedoms.

It’s almost as if religious freedom—including the inalienable right to exercise one’s beliefs by attending church—has become just like any other casual lifestyle choice. By the looks of it, many in positions of authority and a majority of Americans think this right is just a hobby we can push down the list, like going to a baseball game, or to a concert with friends.

There’s a reason why our Founders fought to ensure that religious freedom held a special (and first) place in the U.S. Constitution. They understood that people of faith and churches were essential to the fabric of our society, and therefore it was necessary to restrain government power, so that religious communities could freely live out their faith as well as contribute to the flourishing of our country.

Today, even if many state governors or local officials say otherwise, religious services and religious freedom are still indeed “life-sustaining” and essential. They are a lifeblood for millions in times of national crisis or distress.

It’s worth reminding those officials who relegate religious freedom and the religious community to second tier of a blunt truth: Religious freedom has been essential since the U.S. Constitution was drafted, and today it still is the primary and most essential of our liberties.

Here’s the bottom line: If “We the People” forget, willfully ignore or downgrade religious liberty from being first on the list of freedoms listed in the U.S. Constitution, then it’s a sign we’re in a constitutional crisis.

State Officials Who Think Themselves Above the Supreme Law of the Land

Another clear and present threat to our constitutional system is seen when governors and local officials across several states think they can override or run roughshod over the religious freedoms of Americans.

Consider that in the state of Washington, Gov. Jay Inslee imposed a ban on religious gatherings of any size during the COVID-19 pandemic, even prohibiting two people from meeting together to pray and read scripture and criminalizing all religious gatherings outside of family members.

First Liberty intervened against this attack on religious freedom, seeking a temporary restraining order on behalf of our client, Joshua Freed, who wanted to hold a one-on-one Bible study in his home while adhering to CDC guidelines. Thanks to our involvement, Gov. Inslee backed down and Mr. Freed can have a one-on-one Bible study, and the Governor will not enforce the rules against home Bible studies on a one-on-one basis.

In Kentucky, First Liberty had to fight on behalf of churches prevented by Gov. Andy Beshear’s executive order from holding CDC-compliant religious services, a policy that even threatened them with criminal penalties. In that state, First Liberty won two seminal victories reclaiming the rights of churches to hold both drive-in and safe, in-person services.

Or take a look at the fact that in Chicago, Illinois police recently fined several churches for hosting in-person services. The situation in that state was so bad that Gov. J.B. Pritzker at one point announced he would demand places of worship keep their doors closed until a vaccine is developed (whenever that is!), despite their “over-compliance” with health regulations.

Over the course of the pandemic, there’s been no shortage of government leaders abusing their power and trampling on the U.S. Constitution by singling out and discriminating against people of faith and churches.

The U.S. Constitution is designed to protect religious institutions, so that no governor, state or local official arbitrarily singles out religious activities for restrictions that do not apply to other areas of life. But as we see from the examples above (as well as many more not mentioned here), some in positions of authority don’t really grasp the U.S. Constitution’s protection of religious freedom.

Terrible mismanagement of religious liberty at the state and local level is alarming because it poses a threat to our constitutional system, indeed to the political health of our republic.

Think of it this way. We have a constitutional crisis when governors or municipal leaders put themselves above the Supreme Law of the Land (U.S. Constitution)—like when they make policies that directly violate the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom.

There’s a big lesson to learn here: The health crisis has brought to the forefront the reality of a constitutional crisis, a crisis caused by an impending threat of government interfering with our God-given liberties.

Right now, First Liberty is fighting for and reclaiming the First Amendment freedoms of religious communities nationwide. Protecting religious liberty is essential in this critical time, and it’s the first step in making sure we preserve America’s precious and unique constitutional system.

This article was originally published at FirstLiberty.org.

Written by Dave Olsson

The coronavirus crisis of 2020 has exposed the dark underbelly of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the dangers of U.S. dependency on China. Not only was the CCP irresponsible in concealing the outbreak while allowing it to spread across the globe, but they also threatened to withhold pharmaceuticals so that America would be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus.”

While that international confrontation is serious, the coronavirus has also exposed something else much closer to home and potentially as sinister. As our federal and state governments have reacted to the crisis with “stay-at-home” and “social distancing” directives, it’s revealed a disturbing willingness by some of our state and local authorities to impose orders on local churches that appear to violate their constitutional rights.

In Florida, a pastor was arrested and “charged with unlawful assembly and violation of a public health emergency order” after holding two Sunday services in violation of a safer-at-home order.

In Greenville, Mississippi, congregants were fined $500 each for attending drive-in services in the church parking lot where they kept their windows up and listened as the service was broadcast over the radio.

In Chincoteague Island, VA, a pastor was criminally charged “for violating Governor Northam’s COVID-19 Order 55” after holding a service with 16 people. Northam’s order limited gatherings to 10 people.

In Kansas City, MO, the plan for reopening the city included a requirement to record “names and contact information of attendees” during church services for possible “contact tracing” before it was walked back and made voluntary.

Here in Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker introduced a five-phase reopening plan that “gives guidance to schools, businesses, churches, and other religious centers.” Part of that guidance is that churches “will not be allowed to hold in-person services of more than 50 people until phase five, even if it takes more than a year to get to that position.”

Those are jarring examples of the government interfering in the life of the church. But none caught my attention like the one in Knox County, TN where local authorities took the dangerous step of decreeing what a church service could—and could not—include:

[T]he health department just announced that while churches may reopen on May 1, the Lord’s Supper is forbidden. The order was announced by Knox County Health Department Regional Hospital Coordinator Charity Menefee, who announced that Communion is not part of “core worship.”

The immediate question is, “Who is Charity Menefee and who gave her permission to determine what is or isn’t part of ‘core worship’ in the church?” It gets worse:

Not only that, but church attendees are also banned from physically embracing or shaking hands with one another. And singing, while not banned, “is discouraged as it is thought to be an activity that expels significantly more virus than talking.”

Got that? You may meet, but you may not sing, hug, shake hands or take communion. The order goes on to proscribe the use of hymnals, Bibles and offering plates and prohibits other activities that bring congregants together.

The civil authorities in Knox County are clearly operating outside their jurisdiction. Back in March, Douglas Wilson wrote about the nature and extension of civil government when it comes to the things of God:

In historic Presbyterian polity (all rise!), the civil magistrate had no authority in sacred things (in sacris), but he had definite authority surrounding sacred things (circa sacra). Put simply, the magistrate has no right to tell the church what to preach, how to pray, how to administer the sacraments, who to discipline, etc. That is not their assigned task. They need to stay in their lane.

But when it comes to questions of public safety (which is exactly what this is), preachers need to stay in their lane. It would be different if we were talking about a monastery with a bunch of recluse hermit monks, and the magistrate told them they couldn’t gather in their own chapel for prayers. That would be none of the magistrate’s business. But if great herds of Baptists head out to the Golden Corral after services, and they do this during the time of an epidemic, the magistrate has full authority and obligation to tell all of them “not so fast.” This is circa sacra.

There are so many areas where the church should be resisting statism, it would be shame to waste our powder on any issue where the state is acting well within its rights.

In Knox County, the state is most assuredly not “acting well within its rights.” While Charity Menefee rightly permits churches to reopen based on her authority “surrounding sacred things (circa sacra),” she violates the boundary separating church and state by assuming authority “in sacred things (in sacris).”

Menefee may not have done so with malice; in fact, she may have considered her directive magnanimous. But such a violation is still a violation—and a dangerous one at that because it is done in the name of “safety.”

The question, “You want others to be safe, don’t you?” acts like a sedative on us in which we drop our defenses as the natural impulse to care for others takes over. Of course we want others to be safe.

But that’s not the right question. The question is, “Whose domain?” The practice of communion is not based on whether it is considered “safe” to do so by civil authorities. Follow the progression of that thinking and in ten years communion will be declared “unsafe” because it reinforces religious dogma that increases the risk of perceived threats to some minority group.

No, communion is first and foremost based on the authority of Jesus Himself.

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1 Cor. 11:23-26)

More important for this discussion, the freedom to practice communion without government interference is grounded in the First Amendment, which protects religious belief and expression. With emphasis added, it reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

And in 1940, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Cantwell v. Connecticut that the Free Exercise Clause is enforceable against state and local governments. Menefee, then, is abusing her authority and violating her Christian citizens’ constitutional and God-ordained rights.

When it comes to the act of taking communion, the authority of the U.S. Constitution supersedes the authority of the Knox County Health Department Regional Hospital Coordinator. And the authority of Jesus Christ supersedes the authority of the U.S. Constitution, which protects our God-given right to worship as we see fit.

Fortunately, the Knox County Health Department removed the communion ban and other restrictions, instructing places of worship to “See State Guidance.” If such draconian restrictions return, the churches of Knox County must unite and issue a kind but firm rebuke to the local “magistrate,” making it clear that the encroachment on their civil and religious liberties will not go unchallenged.

The COVID-19 crisis won’t be the last time the local church faces off with civil authorities. While not every act of government interference with the church is illegal or unjustified, it is interference. All churches would be wise to think through how to respond. Even if the orders are legal and compliance is reasonable, such accommodation gives authorities a foot in the door. Be sure that agreeing to a modest request doesn’t lead to them barging all the way in.

This article is an expansion of a previous version published on DAVEOLSSON.COM.