OPINION:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, ruled 10-5 that Rowan County, North Carolina, commissioners couldn’t open their government sessions with prayer.
What a travesty for America, the country that English writer and philosopher Gilbert Keith “G.K.” Chesterton once referred to as “the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed,” a creed that “clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority.’
Prayer is in our national DNA. And now the leftists at the American Civil Liberties Union have won an argument it’s not.
“While we are disappointed in the Fourth Circuit’s decision to ban invocations before legislative meetings contrary to Supreme Court precedent, we are encouraged that the split in the vote on the Fourth Circuit demonstrates the need for the Supreme Court review on this issue,” said Mike Berry, the deputy general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, the group defending the county, in Breitbart.
He was referring to the previous Supreme Court decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway that found in favor of the government’s right to open meetings in prayer.
These challenges to long-standing government practice are growing alarmingly frequent. There’s another one now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit regarding Jackson County, Michigan, government prayer, as a matter of fact.
But let’s be blunt. The issue isn’t so much that prayer is unconstitutional, or in violation of Founding Fathers’ beliefs, visions or personal practice. Our nation’s founders, not all of whom worshipped with the same level of religious intensity, nonetheless appealed to a higher authority — Nature’s God, the Creator, as noted in the Declaration of Independence, for instance — on a regular basis. And note to would-be historical revisionists: It wasn’t the god of Islam, or Buddha or Wicca they prayed to and petitioned for intercession and aid.
That was then, and here and now, today’s Congress still opens sessions in prayer.
So it’s not a matter that public prayer goes against the grain of America’s government, or against previous court rulings on the matter, or against commonly accepted cultural and political practices.
Rather, what’s going on is that loud-mouthed atheists, progressives and other far-leftists have seen a chink in America’s armor of God — an opportunity with this widely reported rise of “nones,” the religiously unaffiliated, to drive forward their vision of an entirely secular society. And they’re pouncing to exploit it. They’re pouncing on the opportunity to drive a permanent wedge between God and government by claiming those who worship, say, Baal or Allah or trees are being left in the cold with prayers of Judeo-Christian bent — that such prayers are “unconstitutionally coercive,” as the 4th Circuit’s majority put it.
What’s their end game? Total secularism. Removing God from the public arena sets up government as the bestower of rights, the granter of privileges, the provider of the people. That’s power in the hands of the government, pure and simple — and whereas God cannot be manipulated and controlled, public servants can.
So, toward that end, the minions of atheism cry about offensiveness of prayer.
Well, here’s a good response to these rabble-rousers: Cover your ears.
A sole atheist voice, a singular snowflakey leftist, a so-called civil rights activist ought not be allowed to overturn years of government practice in America, not to mention infinity-and-beyond truths of humankind’s existence, all because they say they’re feeling alienated and offended. Our country’s No. 1 source of greatness is that citizens know their rights come from God, not government. Those who oppose that idea are enemies of the people and of the nation, and have no business referring to themselves as Americans.
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