Watcher's Council Forum: How Will The Supreme Court Rule On Same-Sex Marriage?

Each week, the Watcher's Council hosts a forum on a topic du jour, as well as a weekly contest among the members for best post. This week's forum question is "how will the Supreme Court rule on same sex marriage?" I have kindly been invited to respond.

Update: The forum is now posted here. Do click over to see how the rest of the respondents answered this question.

The Supreme Court is currently considering same sex marriage in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges. I expect that they will decide the case by discovering that there is a right to gay marriage in the Constitution. It has been, they will claim, perfectly hidden in plain sight in the Constitution for a century and a half.

I also expect the Court's decision to break the camel's back as these supremely arrogant judges force left wing social policy down the throat of this nation and begin a final, direct assault on the rights of conscience of the religious in our land. If you thought the activist Roe v. Wade decision caused turmoil, I can assure you, you haven't seen anything yet. As Bookworm Room pointed out some time ago, unlike with abortion, this decision will, for the first time in our nation's history, make it unlawful to live by the same Judeo-Christian beliefs that have been part of our nation since the Founding.

As I pointed out in The Supreme Court: Originalism, Judicial Activism, & America's Future, there are two schools of Constitutional interpretation, originalism and activism:

Originalists attempt to interpret the Constitution by determining what the people who drafted it and voted for it understood it to mean at the time. An intellectually honest originalist does not announce new policy, he or she interprets history and precedent. That is a bit oversimplified - originalism is certainly not always that clean and can become muddled as precedent builds (and see the discussion here). But because there is always a strong bias to stay limited to what the Constitution says and what the drafters meant, it provides a carefully circumscribed role for unelected judges, thus paying the maximum deference to democracy.

When a Court stops interpreting the meaning of the Constitution and starts to impose its own policy views under the color of a "living constitution," it transforms into a Politburo legislating by fiat. Judicial activists and the left who champions them are the people who see an activist Court as a way around democracy and an irreplaceable tool to remake society.

The left has been relying on judicial activism for the past century to work fundamental, unconstitutional and non-democratic changes to our society, and they have engaged in what has amounted to a jihad on the Judeo-Christian religions. Finding that a right to homosexual marriage has been hiding in the Fourteenth Amendment for the past 147 years would set the stage for the last step in that jihad.

The Fourteenth Amendment holds, in relevant part, that "[n]o State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" - the so called Equal Protection clause. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, for the purpose of insuring that blacks were treated to no legal disability in this nation. There is no evidence whatsoever that those who passed this law intended its provisions to extend to homosexuality. To the contrary, homosexuality was then under legal disability throughout most of the states. To claim now that the Equal Protection clause includes homosexual marriage in its ambit is to make an utter mockery of the Constitution and our system of government. This is not a nation of laws; it is now a nation subject to the whims of activist judges who, in acts of supreme arrogance, corrupt our entire government when they impose social policy at odds with the will of the people of this nation and their elected representatives.

What should happen is that the nine members of the Supreme Court should examine intent of those who drafted and voted for passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. That would inevitably lead to the conclusion that homosexuality is not a "right" enshrined in the 14th Am., and that that there is no Constitutional right to homosexual marriage. The only way to change that at the federal level is through a Constitutional Amendment as set forth in Article V. Barring that, because the Constitution does not concern itself with homosexuality or marriage, this is an issue of social policy that, per the Xth Amendment, should be left to the states. Period.

But what we have on the Court today are at least four judges who live to impose their left wing social policy preferences on our nation, and Justice Kennedy, who has shown himself ready to join the four in support of homosexuality and against the rights of the religious in this nation. Two years ago, Kennedy and the other four struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and refused to hear an appeal seeking to uphold California's referendum on Section 8, defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Last year the Supreme Court let stand a New Mexico decision punishing a Christian photographer targeted by the gay mafia for refusing to photorgaph a gay wedding ceremony. The handwriting is on the wall on this one. We'll see what follows after.

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Watcher's Council Forum: Is Religious Freedom Seriously Threatened In America?

Each week, the Watcher's Council hosts a forum, as well as a contest for best post among the Council members. This weeks forum question, "Is Religious Freedom Seriously Threatened In America?" I have been kindly invited to respond.

If one defines religious freedom as the right to be left alone to live according to the dictates of one's religion and the freedom to impart one's religious values and morality to one's children, than yes, religious freedom is today under mortal threat in America. The attack on religious freedom is a component of the left's larger effort to do away with the Judeo-Christian religions in this country. To understand the threat to religious freedom, one needs to understand how the threat manifests within the context of this larger effort.

When socialism was born in the crucible of the French Revolution, its founders immediately began a brutal war on the Catholic Church and its clergy with the goal of eliminating the Judeo-Christian religion from their country. Denis Diderot, a hero of the Revolution, proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the "guts of the last king." The left's war on the Judeo-Christian religions had begun, and it has never ended since.

The Judeo-Christian religions, with their emphasis on the sanctity of individual life, respect for family and sexual mores, must be removed for the left to succeed in remaking Western civilization under the auspices of an omnipotent government -- a government free to use its police powers to create a new order of ostensible social and economic equality. Simply put, the socialist left needs to eliminate the Judeo-Christian religions so that they can replace God with government as the final source of morality, laws and, indeed, approved thought.

In whatever nation they take root and at whatever historical period, the left's playbook for attacking religion has always been the same, at least in those places where they could not simply ban the Judeo-Christian religions. Step one is to marginalize religion in society. Step two is to intercede in between the family and the child, to take over children's education and impart left wing values. The third and final step is to use the police powers of the state to establish the primacy over religious conscience, in essence delegitimizing religious values and putting the final nail in its coffin.

In America, step one for the left began near a century ago, when the ACLU, an organization explicitly founded to advance socialism, began to bring cases before left leaning courts arguing that the First Amendment's Establishment Clause - That Congress shall make no laws respecting the establishment of religion - meant that there must be complete separation between church and state.

Even the most superficial look to our history will show that such was never the intent of our Founders. The sole purpose of the Establishment Clause was to prevent our government from giving preferential treatment to any Judeo-Christian religious sect, as was the custom in Europe. For but one example, the same Congress that drafted the First Amendment also passed the Northwest Ordinance "which declares that “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged;” and early Congresses proceeded to make grants of land to serve religious purposes and to fund sectarian education among the Indians."

None-the-less, the ACLU argued, on the basis of a single phrase in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists, that the Establishment Clause in the modern era should be read to create a "wall of separation between Church and State." Our Courts, the most dangerous branch of our government, reinterpreted the Establishment Clause and, ever since the 1947 decision in Everson, have been engaged in systematically removing all of the symbols, trappings and influence of the Judeo Christian religions from our schools and public institutions. This line of cases was taken to the radical extreme in the 2002 Lawrence v. Texas case, when the Supreme Court majority held that religion can no longer be viewed as providing a "rational basis" for our nation's laws.

A second component to this initial step, to marginalize religion, has been to muzzle political speech by religious organizations through restrictions in the tax code. Throughout our history, our religious institutions were free to speak without limit in the political realm. And indeed, in 1776, the Congregationalist and Presbyterian sects in large measure drove our American Revolution on religious grounds, equating the concept of British liberty with biblical scripture. When Benjamin Franklin proposed a design for the Great Seal of the United States in 1776, he suggested that the motto adorning the seal be "Resistance To Tyrants Is Obedience To God." That was a very pithy and accurate summation of religious thought in the colonies at the time of our Founding. And yet in 1954, the left, led by then Senator Lyndon Johnson, made changes to the tax code that allowed the IRS to strip any religious organization of its tax exempt status for overt political speech, thus circumscribing what church leaders could say from the pulpit and effectively dampening concerted action by congregations.

The second step in the war on religion in America could be termed a war on families. It has been an effort to put the state in place of the family, with the goal being to impart socialist values in place of the family's own religious, moral and ethical values. When Hillary Clinton said many years ago that it "takes a village to raise a child," that was a very pithy summation of the left's mindset. An even clearer example came a few years ago from Prof. Melissa Harris Perry.



Once the left claims the children, what they teach them begins with sex. The social justice values that the left seeks to teach come later. It is sex that provides the bedrock foundation for the left's efforts at supplanting the family and establishing the primacy of socialist values. It is not hard to see why.

Sex is a basic human instinct. Untamed, it is an animalistic instinct, devoid of emotional content or commitment and, while resulting in the greatest of physical pleasures, it is also an act that can have the most profound physical and emotional consequences. A major concern of the Judeo-Christian religions has always been to make sex only acceptable in relationships between a married couple, man and woman. This significantly eliminates the potential negative consequences of sex and places maximum value on the basic building block of society, the family. So it has been since time immemorial, and that is why the left long ago opted to use sex as its primary tool in its effort to have the state stand in loco parentis. As Bookworm Room wrote a few years ago, "The state has driven a wedge into the family unit, using the most potent endorphin driver available to motivate and reorient young people."

The mother of this movement in America was the socialist founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. In the early part of the 20th century, she led the movement to legalize birth control devices and abortion, casting herself explicitly as an implacable opponent of Christianity and the moral dimension to sex that the Judeo Christian religions provide. We can see her efforts very much at work today.

At law, the left has been successful in supplanting the family when it comes to sex. As a result of recent court decisions, a girl today of any age can walk into a pharmacy and purchase birth control and even abortifacients without parental knowledge. In NYC and in many other locales, birth control and abortifacients are made freely available through public school systems and a child or teenager may access them without any parental notification or approval. In California and many other states, a sixteen year old girl can "get birth control, get abortions, and get treated for sexually transmitted diseases, all without a parents’ knowledge."

In a brilliant piece of analysis, Bookworm Room, in an article Sex and State Power written for the American Thinker, examines the relationship between sex, individuality and the goals of the left and other statists. Therein she gives numerous examples of how the left, often through our schools and under the ostensible guise of teaching tolerance, is seeking to normalize and promote values and mores concerning sexuality that are decoupled from, and antithetical to, religious morality. This is, she argues convincingly, a necessary step in moving the child towards socialism. Indeed, as Bookworm sums up:

[I]f you're getting an itchy feeling between your shoulder blades when you contemplate your child's hyper-sexualized reading list and gender-bending sex education curriculum, you need not fear that you have turned into a repressed, homophobic Victorian. Instead, there's an excellent chance that you are someone with a deep respect for individual freedom who resents the Leftists' efforts to co-opt your child's body as a necessary sacrifice to the State.

And that brings us to the third and final stage of the assault on religion, using the police power of the state to establish the primacy of state approved thought and values, and to use that same police power to punish those who would stand by their religious values and conscience. We are seeing that play out as a result of the gay rights movement and Obama's HHS mandate, as well as in the public realm where the left heaps outrageous outrage on any who would, in any way, fall afoul of their socialist values, either at the personal level, such as with Brendan Eich, or the state level, as we see today with the response to Indiana's RFRA law, addressed at length in an especially insightful post by Bookworm Room here.

If you wonder how the "gay rights" movement has exploded so quickly onto our national stage, you need look no further than our Courts. Left wing judges have stood primed for the last century to move our nation ever father to the left. In the last few years, laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman are being struck down left and right by judges using an utterly laughable interpretation of the Equal Rights clause of our 14th Amendment. No one can argue, with a straight face, that gay rights were in the contemplation of the people who drafted and passed the 14th Amendment in 1868. And yet our Courts have wholly at their whim reinterpreted that provision and now use this novel legal theory to uphold a newly found Constitutional right to gay marriage. At the Supreme Court, last year they refused to hear and sustain a California state wide referendum on Proposition 8 while, in the next breath, struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. That set the stage for the "gay rights" movement to begin the final push, targeting Christians and Jews who refuse to violate their religious conscience by taking any action to validate "gay marriage."

This war on religious freedom is also at the heart of the Obamacare HHS mandate, discussed at length here, that all Americans purchase insurance policies that include, and that all employers provide coverage that includes, free birth control and abortifacients. This is a gross intrusion on the rights of religious conscience, and yet the Obama administration provided only a very narrow category of people and institutions who would be allowed to object. This could not be more of a fundamental attack on the freedom of religion. The final decision on whether this HHS mandate will stand and in what contexts still, in many ways, remains up in the air, though the Supreme Court, in a bare majority 5-4 decision, did rule in favor of one religious employer, Hobby Lobby, in their opposition to the mandate. The Beckett Fund is handling a significant number of these cases.

One would think that rights of religious conscience would be a final and effective bulwark against these attacks from the left on religious freedom. After all, immediately after the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the Free Exercise clause states that "Congress shall make no laws . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion.]" Ironically, the same letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists in 1802 that the left seized upon to interpret the Establishment Clause and start its war on religion in America, the one containing the phrase "a wall of separation between Church and state," reads in succeeding sentences like our modern religious freedom laws -- i.e., Indiana's proposed RFRA and the other similar federal and state laws. Jefferson talks therein about the "rights of conscience" and his full expectation that man "has no natural right in opposition to his social duties." But whether our leftward bending Courts will uphold rights of religious conscience from attacks by the left looks doubtful. It was just last year that the Supreme Court refused to review a New Mexico decision punishing a wedding photographer for refusing to service a gay wedding. If that stands, then there is no longer any right to religious freedom in this country and the First Amendment's Free Exercise clause is a nullity.

So, is religious freedom under attack in America? Not only yes, but it's been under continuous, sustained attack for the past century on multiple fronts, and now is fighting a rear guard action, perhaps on the final battlefield. This is a zero sum game for the left, and they will not stop their attacks until the Judeo-Christian religions have been delegitimized in this nation. It is quite literally a battle for the heart and soul of this nation, and if religion loses, the left will become permanently ascendent. Those who value religion need to understand the many battlefields on which the left is attacking religion in this nation and figure out ways to effectively fight back in each of them. Clearly though, one of the most central concerns must be to demand reforms to our out of control Court system, where unelected judges make of themselves petty tyrants, taking questions of social policy with profound implications for our nation out of the hands of the people.

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Three Worth Reading Today

There are several good articles out recently worthy of your attention. At Bookworm Room, the author skillfully weaves together three thoughts, criticism of the left's superficial caricature of the Christianity, the actual purpose of Indiana's RFRA, and the motivations of the left in attacking the RFRA hidden behind the stated goal of protecting gay rights. Jesus Would Have Supported RFRA:

The only thing that the law does is to say, consistent with both Jesus’s teachings and the Constitution, that people of conscience cannot be forced to bring commerce or government diktats into their own inviolable area of faith. Put another way, to the extent marriage is a core sacrament to the faithful, the law cannot force them to sell themselves out — in effect, to become coerced money changers in their own temple.

Incidentally, while I’m on the subject of the gay lobby pushing ever harder on Christians and Christian doctrine, let me say that all of this was predictable. Years and years ago, I warned that gay marriage had nothing to do with marriage and everything to do with toppling religion.

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson takes a look at the pettiness and malevolence driving Obama's presidency, as well as the lawlessness with which it is being run. Obama's Chicago Presidency

Once that pen-and-phone threshold has been crossed, anything is possible — and even the critics of Obama now belatedly accept that. In brilliantly diabolical fashion, the president of the United States has all but ruined the Democratic party in Congress and the state legislatures, but has also confounded his Republican opponents by not caring a whit about his own nihilism — as if he is supposed to worry about ending the congressional careers of his supposed allies?

After all, if someone is going to ignore the law or what tradition demands, then why does he need a legislative majority to do it? Obama is more powerful in defeat than he ever was in victory. Like a seasoned Chicago pol, he reminds his auditors and critics that not only does he not care about the appearance of his actions, but also that no else does either. He all but says, “Each time I issue an illegal executive order, my polls go up, and the more my enemies howl and my friends cringe.” It becomes more hazardous — ask Senator Menendez or an audited Tea Party group — to object to an Obama abuse than for Obama to commit the abuse, which makes further abuse only more certain.

And also at National Review, Thomas Sowell discusses how the left has turned the liberal arts into a means for indoctrination rather than education. As he points out, the rights criticism is not of the liberal arts education, but rather what the left has made of it. Who Really Trashes The Liberal Arts:

The history of the 20th century shows soft-subject students and their professors among the biggest supporters of extremist movements, both fascist and communist — the former in central and eastern Europe before World War II and the latter in countries around the world, both before and after that war.

Those who want the liberal arts to be what they were supposed to be will have to profoundly change them from what they have become. Doing that will undoubtedly provoke more denunciations of critics for “trashing” the liberal arts by criticizing those who have in fact already trashed the liberal arts in practice.

Good articles. Happy reading.

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Wolf Bytes: The 'We're Watching You' Edition

Taking joy in one's holidays: A Rube Goldberg Passover Celebration

Indiana isn’t targeting gays; liberals are targeting religion: Indiana's RFRA & The New Intolerance

And the shameless leftie hypocrisy award has to go to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who just bashed Indiana for their RFRA: Apple Does Business In Countries That Execute Homosexuals

Perhaps some of the left's priorities are misplaced: It’s Legal to Kill Babies, But Let’s Worry About a Gay Person’s Right to Cake

Of course, religion in the west is not the penultimate target of the left: Noam Chomsky On How The Foundational Document of Western Civilization, The Magna Carta, "Messed Up The World"

Would that the left showed the same degree of concern for the ever growing e-mail scandal: Hillary, despite claiming that she set up a private e-mail account so she could use one receptor device, regularly used two devices for her e-mail

Even Nixon wasn't this shameless: Hillary Wiped Her Personal Server Clean, Quite Possibly In Violation Of Several Criminal Statutes

Meanwhile, we get to live life in a socialist regulatory bureaucracy run wild: You Are Probably Breaking The Law Right Now
While I agree with Prof. Reynold's comments about partial correction, the real correction is to reestablish the Constitutional balance. Nothing should pass with the force of legislation that has not been voted upon by our elected representatives. See Art. 1 Sec. 1 of our Constitution.

Peer review is not a measure of reliability or accuracy, nor is it in any way a substitute for the scientific method: The Peerless Pitfalls of Peer Review

And while on the subject of peer reviewed articles: Institute of Physics Accused of Corruption as Climate Change '97% Consensus' Claim is Debunked

South Korea doesn't have a welfare state: The Sea Women of South Korea

Let's round this out with the greatest hits of MSNBC:

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Wolf Bites

Standing Athwart (AP) History: College Board AP U.S. History Standards Would Teach US History Through The Lens Of the Oppressed versus the Oppressor

Obama, Reid & Pelosi Makes Four: Bush Defends His Support For Immigration & Common Core

Go Green, Rev Your SUV: Carbon Dioxide Greening The Planet

The Left's Continued Drive To Do Away With The Judeo-Christian Religion: South Carolina college scrutinized for 'biblical' stance on homosexuality

Ummm, No, Don't Think So: Megan McCardle Thinks It's Time To Give Jonathan Gruber A Break

That Was Fast: A Brief History Of The Speed of Light

Pondering The Unponderable: The Mechanics Of An 800kt Nuclear Explosion Over Manhattan

Doesn't She Look Good In Her DNA?: Constructing A Face From A DNA Sample

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Nothing More Racist (Or Regressive) Than A "Progressive"

Pat Condell hits the nail on the head in his discussion of those who style themselves "progressives," from their complete lack of intellectual honesty to their regressive politics to their racism of low expectations:



Pat's take misses on one point and only alludes to another worthy of more specific citation. Condell describes the world view of "progressives" correctly, even down to their view of the West as imperialists with the stain of original sin (while ignoring that the most imperialist force in world history has been Islam). It is worth noting that this view comes directly from Karl Marx and his theory that all history is a struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors. In the progressive world view, we are the oppressors while anyone who can be shoehorned into a victim group are the oppressed entitled to permanent special treatment.

What Condell misses in his analysis is the animus of progressives towards Christianity. To understand fully the motivation of progressives, one must note their abhorrence of Christianity. Christianity is the foundation of Western civilization; progressive are warring against it. Christianity must be removed from the public square for "progressives" to achieve their goal of remaking society with themselves as the sole arbiters of morality. Thus the "progressive" treatment of Islam is more nuanced than simply that "brown skinned" people are not to be held to the same standards. Muslims also seek to displace Christianity, and thus they are, in many ways, allied with progressives.

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The War On Christianity - New Mexico Edition

From Yahoo News

A New Mexico event photographer's refusal on religious grounds to shoot the commitment ceremony of a same-sex couple amounted to illegal discrimination, the state's highest court ruled on Thursday.

New Mexico, along with 20 other states and the District of Columbia, has a law that explicitly protects individuals from being discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. Another 29 states have no such protection.

In refusing to photograph the ceremony, Elane Photography violated the New Mexico Human Rights Act in the same way that it would have if the company had refused to photograph an inter-racial wedding, the New Mexico Supreme Court said.

"We conclude that a commercial photography business that offers its services to the public, thereby increasing its visibility to potential clients, is subject to the anti-discrimination provisions of the and must serve same-sex couples on the same basis that it serves opposite-sex couples," the court ruled.

Jordan Lorence, a lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom who represented Elane Photography, said he is likely to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We believe that the First Amendment protects the right of people not to communicate messages that they disagree with," he said in a telephone interview.

Joshua Block, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the couple, said the ruling rejected a "frighteningly far-reaching" argument for allowing private companies to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

"The Constitution guarantees religious freedom in this country, but we are not entitled to use our beliefs as an excuse to discriminate against other people," said Louise Melling, also of the ACLU.

The ruling came as at least two lawsuits by same-sex couples seeking the right to marry are working their way through the New Mexico court system. So far, the New Mexico Supreme Court has declined to rule on whether gay marriage should be allowed in the state, sending the matter to lower courts.

Thirteen U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia, now allow same-sex marriage.

This is nothing more or less than the left using the police powers of the state to attack Christianity and force secular values in the public square at the point of a gun. It is one more domino in the left's war on Christianity. Socialism was given birth in the French Revolution, and it emerged with an overarching goal of driving religion from the public square - a goal that has been at the forefront of the left ever since. As one of the French revolutionaries opined, they should "strangle the last priest with the guts of the last king."

The left have that goal because, in order to remake society, the government must be the only arbiter of morality, the only source of immutable law. Christianity and Judaism, in particular, then, are their implacable enemies.

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A Real Scandal

Today, the Obama administration dropped its right to appeal a judge's decision mandating that the Abortion Plan B pill be made available over the counter to underage girls without limitation - no prescription necessary, no need for parental consent. I've written on this before (see here and here). It is the left's war on the family and on religion. It is replacing parental discretion with the left wing government's judgement on how children should be raised, and it is furthering the left's goal of sexualizing our children. Of all the scandals coming out of Washington today, this one is the least noticed, yet the one with the greatest potential long term ramifications.

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Is It Getting Warm Yet, Joe?

I am not sure what the eternal penalty is for lying about the Catholic church, but let's just say that Joe really tempted fate last night with his whopper about Obamacare not being part of a war on religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Here is what Biden said:

With regard to the assault on the Catholic Church, let me make it absolutely clear. No religious institution—Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital—none has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact. That is a fact.

Well, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) pointed out in oh so tactful language today, that "is not a fact." Actually, as they go on to explain, it's a complete falsehood. You can read the entire response Bishops here. It's one thing to spin the truth, but another matter entirely to make out right false claims. Joe was doing the latter last night on several topics, but this one really stands out. I think he better pack some ice and fireproof undies for when it comes time to make that final trip off the mortal coil. Just saying.

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Abortion, Sonograms & The War On Women

Carolyn Jones has written a column in the Texas Observer about her experience under the new Texas law requiring a sonogram prior to having an abortion. She clearly considers the law a part of the "war on women."

Ms. Jones decided to abort a pregnancy after she found that the child had birth defects that would have, she tells us, required "life time medical care" and left the child "in pain." Curiously, precisely what the child's condition was, Ms. Jones seemingly takes pains not to specify. Irrespective, Ms. Jones does have my sympathy for finding that her unborn child had birth defects.

What is utterly ludicrous and disgusting is Ms. Jones's melodramatic recounting of the "ordeal" of having to undergo a sonogram and see the life she held in her womb prior to having the abortion. This short, non-invasive procedure, designed to make apparent the moral implications of abortion, is, according to Ms. Jones, nothing less than "torment." Fortunately, her "ordeal" was somewhat ameliorated by the good people at Planned Parenthood, whom she describes with a varying list of positive adjectives, from 'compassionate' and 'warm' to 'sympathetic' and 'professional.'

When told by the Planned Parenthood staff that she would have to have the sonogram per Texas law prior to the abortion, Ms. Jones tells us that she replied:

“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.”

How much of a narcissistic, amoral if not immoral individual do you have to be to near hysterically center on 'your pain' and not the life that you are about to extinguish. But the extremes of melodrama were not done.

“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.

“Here I see a well-developed diaphragm and here I see four healthy chambers of the heart...”

I closed my eyes and waited for it to end, as one waits for the car to stop rolling at the end of a terrible accident. . . .

What it all boils down to is this - the far left, and most definitely Ms. Jones - do not want any moral considerations associated with abortion. This is part of the reason why the left is an implacable enemy of religion and any continuing role for Christian morality in the public square. They want an omnipotent government to be the sole moral arbiter, and abortion is one of the tools through which they are trying to accomplish that goal. And indeed, Ms. Jones goes so far as to cast her freedom from morality as a right. Ms. Jones does not believe that the state has any role in furthering the sanctity of life.

It is important to note that the Texas law, as currently interpreted, does not require a woman carrying a child with significant birth defects to undergo a sonogram prior to the decision to abort. The rule was so new at the time that Ms. Jones went for her abortion that Planned Parenthood went ahead with the sonogram out of an abundance of caution. But Ms. Jones makes absolutely clear that it is the sonogram for any woman seeking an abortion to which she objects. And as she says in conclusion to her screed:

[W]hat good is the view of someone who has never had to make your terrible choice? What good is a law that adds only pain and difficulty to perhaps the most painful and difficult decision a woman can make? Shouldn’t women have a right to protect themselves from strangers’ opinions on their most personal matters? Shouldn’t we have the right not to know?

What immoral arrogance. Countless people have been faced with pregnancies of children that they knew had birth defects. But Ms. Jones's point goes far beyond that, to every woman who is pregnant and considers abortion.

Abortion snuffs out a human life. Shouldn't the people of our nation, acting through the state, have the right to insure that the woman who makes the decision to abort at least understands the moral implications of that decision? Ms. Jones casts this as heinous. What is truly heinous is the belief of Ms. Jones and her ilk, who devalue human life and see in abortion no moral issue at all. A 10 minute sonogram under the Texas law is not part of a "war on women." It is Ms. Jones and her ilk who are in the midst of a war on religion and morality in the U.S. And that war goes beyond abortion. It is for the heart and soul of our nation. Pick your side.

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From Ridyah To Washington - The Islamic War On Christianity & Obama's Silence

This from the editors of the Washington Times:

On March 12, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, declared that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” The ruling came in response to a query from a Kuwaiti delegation over proposed legislation to prevent construction of churches in the emirate. The mufti based his decision on a story that on his deathbed, Muhammad declared, “There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula.” This passage has long been used to justify intolerance in the kingdom. Churches have always been banned in Saudi Arabia, and until recently Jews were not even allowed in the country. Those wishing to worship in the manner of their choosing must do so hidden away in private, and even then the morality police have been known to show up unexpectedly and halt proceedings.

This is not a small-time radical imam trying to stir up his followers with fiery hate speech. This was a considered, deliberate and specific ruling from one of the most important leaders in the Muslim world. It does not just create a religious obligation for those over whom the mufti has direct authority; it is also a signal to others in the Muslim world that destroying churches is not only permitted but mandatory.

The response to this outrage from the White House (and the MSM) has been utter silence. That is no surprise. Anyone who believes Obama is a practicing Christian (or a Muslim, for that matter) is deeply misguided. Obama is a secular leftie, and that makes him, like all on the left, an enemy of Christianity and Judaism. If you think I overstate, please see here. And it makes him a friend of Islam in as much as it too is an enemy of Christianity. But I think Obama goes beyond the natural leftie impulse in respect of Islam. As I wrote before:

[I]t seems apparent that [Obama's] time spent in Indonesia where he was living in a heavily Islamic environment has colored his views on Islam. He seems to have extrapolated from from what he observed of the benign form of Islam practiced in the Indonesia of his youth to the Islamic world as a whole. That is an incredibly naive error. The Shafi'i school of Islam, practiced in Indonesia during Obama's stay there, is not the norm for the Islamic world. More and more the norm is Wahhabi-Salafi Islam, the far more militant, racist, misogynistic ideology at the heart of al Qaeda.

Do note that Wahhabi-Salafi is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and its Grand Mufti, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the would be destroyer of Churches.

At any rate, all of the above might explain Obama's unconscionable silence on the treatment of Christians in the Middle East. But that silence could have significant ramifications in the instant case. To continue from the Washington Times editorial:

The White House has placed international outreach to Muslims at the center of its foreign policy in an effort to promote the image of the United States as an Islam-friendly nation. This cannot come at the expense of standing up for the human rights and religious liberties of minority groups in the Middle East. The region is a crucial crossroads. Islamist radicals are leading the rising political tide against the authoritarian, secularist old order. They are testing the waters in their relationship with the outside world, looking for signals of how far they can go in imposing their radical vision of a Shariah-based theocracy. Ignoring provocative statements like the mufti’s sends a signal to these groups that they can engage in the same sort of bigotry and anti-Christian violence with no consequences.

Mr. Obama’s outreach campaign to the Muslim world has failed to generate the good will that he expected. In part, this was because he felt it was better to pander to prejudice than to command respect. When members of the Islamic establishment call for the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing, the leader of the free world must respond or risk legitimizing the oppression that follows. The United States should not bow to the extremist dictates of the grand mufti, no matter how desperate the White House is for him to like us.

Somehow, I think that the only thing we will hear from Obama is continued silence. This is, after all, the man who recently signed us up through the UN for the Islamic push to silence criticism of Islam.

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More News In The "War On Religion"

The left's "war on religion" is in full swing on both sides of the pond. In the UK, it is rapidly coming to the point where to be a Christian is to be a second class citizen. The Tory government has taken the position in the European Court of Human Rights that employers can fire someone for wearing a cross. Further, although same sex unions are recognized in the UK, the Tory government plans to allow same-sex "marriage" by 2015. This from CNS News:

Britain’s Conservative-led government [Note: The Tory's are "conservative" in name only - they are only a slightly less radical version of Britain's socialist Labor party] plans to argue in a European Court of Human Rights case that employers are entitled to ban the visible wearing of crosses at work because displaying the symbol is not a recognized “requirement” of the Christian faith. . . .

News of the government’s intervention in the case comes amid a raging dispute between the government and church leaders over Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans to legalize same-sex marriage by 2015.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is the final destination of two drawn-out legal battles, brought by Nadia Eweida and Shirley Chaplin, two women who fell foul of their employers for wearing crosses at work.

Eweida, a Coptic Christian and British Airways staffer at Heathrow Airport, was told in 2006 to remove or cover up a small cross she wears around her neck. She refused and was sent home on unpaid leave. Eweida noted that colleagues of other religions, including Muslims and Sikhs, were allowed to wear religious items such as hijabs, turbans and religious bracelets.

The airline policy won the backing of the National Secular Society, which complained that activists were “determined to push religion to the front line of British life” and accused Eweida of clearly being “motivated by a wish to evangelize at work.”

The following year British Airways changed its uniform policy and allowed Eweida to return to work, but refused to pay her for the period she was suspended. Claiming religious discrimination, she took the case to an employment tribunal, but lost.

After the Supreme Court declined to consider her case, she decided to take the matter to the ECHR.

Chaplin, a nurse in her 50s, was prohibited from working at a hospital after refusing to cover up a cross she said she had worn at work throughout a 30-year nursing career. An employment tribunal in 2010 ruled in favor of the employer, a government National Health Service (NHS) trust, saying its policy was based on health and safety grounds, not religion, and adding that wearing a cross was not a requirement for Christians.

Six senior Anglican bishops, including former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, backed Chaplin, saying in a March 2010 letter that that nurse “has worn the cross every day since her confirmation [40 years earlier] as a sign of her Christian faith, a faith which led to her vocation in nursing, and which has sustained her in that vital work ever since.”

“The uniform policy of the NHS trust permits exemptions for religious clothing,” they wrote. “This has been exercised with regard to other faiths, but not with regard to the wearing of a cross around the neck.”

The ECHR has also been asked to consider two other cases brought by British Christians claiming religious discrimination – a woman who lost her job with a London council in 2007 after she refused to conduct civil partnership ceremonies for same-sex couples; and a relationship counselor who was fired by a large national charity after refusing to provide sex therapy to same-sex couples.

Britain has given same-sex couples similar legal rights to married couples under civil partnership provisions introduced in 2005.

Now Cameron’s government is proposing to legalize marriage for same-sex couples in England and Wales, launching a public consultation exercise on the matter.

Although churches will not be forced to perform “weddings” for homosexual and lesbian couples, the proposals have ignited a storm of protest.

A letter by senior Roman Catholic archbishops, read at thousands of churches across England and Wales on Sunday, warned that that changing the legal definition of marriage would be a “profoundly radical step” that would “gradually and inevitably transform society’s understanding of the purpose of marriage.”

(H/T Sunlit Uplands and the Daily Gator)

As I wrote recently in A Historical Perspective On Religion & The HHS Mandate:

Socialism is a radical ideology that sprang up largely in response to the ills of the industrial revolution. The goal of socialism is to deconstruct traditional Western society and remake it under the auspices of an omnipotent government that would use its police powers to create a new order of ostensible social and economic equality. Socialists replace God with government as the source of morality.

That is precisely what is happening with this war on Christianity on both sides of the pond. It is a war that the left is winning - and if they fully succeed, history teaches us that the resulting society will more resemble the Soviet Union, circa 1919, than the U.S. in 1776.

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Morality, Infanticide & The "Culture War"

What does morality look like when it has become unmoored from the Judeo Christian ethic? Here is one example:

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life.’

This should not be shocking. Historically, infanticide was an accepted practice in many cultures and, indeed, was part of several pagan religions. most notably the cult of Moloch. It was only with the growth of Judaism and, ultimately, Christianity that the practice fell out of favor in the West.

But the socialist left has long been intent on destroying the Judeo Christian underpinnings of our society. When that happens, it is the few people in power who decide what is to be deemed moral and immoral, what is to be deemed acceptable and what is to be deemed punishable, Never in history has any wholly secular moral code claimed the sanctity of individual human life as its defining characteristic. As Lenin said in a speech in 1920, after declaring that socialists should have no "belief in God," and that they should reject morality based on Christian traditions, he opined that "morality is entirely subordinated" to the interests of the state.

It is the man-made morality of the socialist left that resulted in the slaughter of over 100 million people in the 20th century. In the far left's secular view of the life, there is no soul, nor is there any threat of punishment or reward after life on earth. Thus individual life has no intrinsic worth and its value is defined in purely pragmatic and relativistic terms. Maintaining the power of the state and attempting to meet utopian ideals takes precedence over individual life. Call it the culture wars or whatever you like, but the dominant theme of our lifetime is the struggle between those who would keep our nation based in the Judeo Christian tradition and those who would substitute government as our nation's moral arbiter. The left has been engaged in this war through the Courts for over the last half century, and now, with Obama in power, they are forcing it through our nation's regulations.

Make no mistake, this culture war is at the heart of the HHS mandate being foisted on America by Obama. It is a mandate that has nothing to do with the availability of contraception to women - its already available at minimal to, in some cases, no cost - and everything to do with, at once, harming religion and, simultaneously, furthering the secular left's amoral views of sex. The genesis of the HHS mandate is from the same leftist wellspring that gives us an argument for infanticide.

Because the left's war on religion in America has been so protracted and incremental, not many people realize the fundamental changes being wrought to the character of our nation, nor, unfortunately, do many people know where these changes logically lead. Far too many people yawn at the "culture war," having no idea just what is really at stake. It is a battle for the heart and, ironically enough, the "soul" of our nation.

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A Turning Point In History - Feb. 21, 1848: Marx Publishes The Communist Manifesto

Reposted From Feb. 21, 2011:


On this day in 1848, socialist philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, first published their magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto. In it, Marx advocated for a complete reworking of society, starting with the formation of labor unions, building into socialism and then to communism. It marks the single most destructive and distorting philosophy ever put forth in history, bringing untold misery to the world and working destruction upon the fabric of Western civilization to this day. Its promise has always been that society can be perfected by government and utopia achieved on earth. And while it has done some societal good in the West, the overarching reality has been economic misery and massive bloodshed.

I. Background, Philosophy & Goals

At the time Marx wrote his book, he was responding to very real problems in European society during the Industrial Revolution. Sweat shops, dangerous work places and slave wages were only a few of those problems. Moreover, European society tended to be very stratified, with many obstacles to moving between economic and social classes. Marx was also responding to Europe's colonialism as a similar evil of "oppression." And indeed, colonialism of the era, as practiced by all but the British, at least in retrospect, could be so characterized. His solutions, as expressed in The Communist Manifesto and other works, were well intentioned, but as explained below, his basic assumption about the regulation of economic markets was wildly false and his analytical framework of history was both superficial and grossly distorting.

All of that is to say that Marx's socialism is not an inherent evil. Some aspects or legacies of socialism that have found their way throughout Western society since 1848 are quite legitimate. As Bookworm Room states in a very informative post on the topic, protections for workers and a safe workplace are some of those legacies. The great weakening of the class system and the rise of the welfare state are others. And while the latter has gotten wildly out of hand, the proposition that society should provide a minimalist, temporary safety net is quite legitimate. Unfortunately, for what good Marx's socialism has done for society at large, the harm it has done has been exponentially greater.

Marx did not invent socialism, but he greatly stengthened its philosophical underpinnings, as well as describing and agitating for the final stage of socialism, communism. As I described it previously:

Steeped in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and born in the crucible of the French Revolution, socialism was meant to wholly rework society. Socialist philosophers, most notably Karl Marx, rejected class and religion as the bases for societal structure and advocated remaking society under the watchful eye of a central government that would redistribute the nation's wealth and mandate social equality. At the center of the socialist revolution was the Marxian belief that all events could and should be analyzed in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim classes and the victimizing class - a simplistic and distorting theme that makes up such a large part of our political discourse today. It creates, in its myopic view, a world of demons and perpetual victims. As Marx wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Inherent in that proposition is a rejection of Western values, history and norms and, in its stead, an embrace of militant secularism, moral relativism and, [in modern form], multiculturalism.

II. The Process:

Marx envisioned a multistep process to communism. The very first step, as he pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, was for workers to create unions:

. . . [T]he workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle . . .

From there, Marx envisioned society passing into socialism, with the state owning the means of production, and then into finally into full communism:

The Marxist conception of socialism is that of a specific historical phase that will displace capitalism and precede communism. The major characteristics of socialism (particularly as conceived by Marx and Engels after the Paris Commune of 1871) are that the proletariat [workers] will control the means of production through a workers' state erected by the workers in their interests. Economic activity would still be organised through the use of incentive systems and social classes would still exist, but to a lesser and diminishing extent than under capitalism.

For orthodox Marxists, socialism is the lower stage of communism based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution" while upper stage communism is based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; the upper stage becoming possible only after the socialist stage further develops economic efficiency and the automation of production has led to a superabundance of goods and services.

III. Application Outside Of The West

A. Economic Model

As an economic model, neither communism nor socialism has ever succeeded in comparison to capitalism. This is because the central assumption of the socialist model - that governments can be a more efficient regulator of economies than free markets - has been proven false beyond any iota of rational argument. Related thereto, communism and socialism have failed because they look upon the fiscal self interest motivating the capitalist class as the penultimate sin.

"Greed" is not a dirty word, despite what our Commander in Chief might say in his attacks on capitalism. When fiscal self interest has been championed and combined with free market competition, it has massively lifted the standard of living for all in its ambit, including the lowest economic classes. And it should be noted that, in a free market economy, being a member of the lowest economic class at any given point is, for the vast majority, a transitory state. But when the opportunity to pursue one's fiscal self interest has been denied to the populace at large, as happens under socialism and communism, history has shown the result to be misery.

Those nations that have embraced socialism, with the government owning the means of production, are - or were before their collapse - economic basket cases. The Soviet Union fell apart in the 90's as a result of economic collapse. Communist China was well on their way to following the Soviet Union until Deng Xiaoping become the leader of the country and replaced communist economics with free market economics, starting China's economy on the road to what has been decades of rapid expansion. Cuba, North Korea, and Burma maintain full blown socialist economic systems, and all three have some of the lowest standards of living in the world today. In South America, Chavez is still in the midst of moving Venezuela into socialism, and its standard of living is tanking with stagflation and food rationing.

Similarly, in the Middle East, socialism and its closely related variant, crony capitalism, abound. Neither have worked there. For example, Iran, where government clerics own - and get rich off of - the major industries, is an economic basket case. Egypt is another example of a state with dominant socialist economics - and indeed, economic conditions were the motivating factor behind the recent revolution.

B. Social/Political Model

As a political and social model, Marx's philosophy has been even more destructive than its economic model. Marx's utopian world required an all powerful central government to enforce the distribution of wealth, to perfect society, to enforce equality of outcome, and to motivate people to produce in the absence of a profit motive. Marxism further rejected Judeo-Christian morality, leaving the state as the unchecked final arbiter of what is right and wrong, and thus prioritized individual human life below political goals to benefit the "proletariat" and the state. The end result has been slaughter on a scale never before seen in history. Well over 100 million people were murdered by their own communist regimes in the 20th century.

In China, "official study materials published in 1948 [show that] Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (or about 50,000,000 [people]) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform." In the end, between the agrarian reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Mao actually exceeded that total by several million. The Soviet Union purged at least as many of its citizens, if not far more, from its inception through the end of Stalin's regime. China and the Soviet Union were not anamolies. Virtually every country that has seen the imposition of communism has also seen government sponsored mass murder on a wide, if not industrial scale. For example, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered roughly 20% of its population. In North Korea, somewhere between 710,000 and 3,500,000 of the populace have been slaughtered by the Kim dynasty.

IV. Marxism In The West

A. Europe

Britain is a casebook study in the experimentation with Marx's socialist ethos, both economically through the 1980's and, in social policy, through today. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain embraced socialism, voting in 1945 to reject their war-time leader Winston Churchill, in favor of Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlees's first orders of business were the creation of the welfare state, the nationalization of major industry, the creation of nationalized medicine, and the divestiture of the empire. Tremendous power was placed in the hands of labor unions, and Britain suffered economically for decades. It took Margaret Thatcher to turn things around:

She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the sale or closure of state-owned companies and withdrawal of subsidies to others. . . She took a hard line against trade unions.

Perhaps most important in the turn from economic socialism, Thatcher significantly weakened the political power of Britain's labor unions, reforming them in a manner not too dissimilar to what we see occurring in Wisconsin today. Such was Britain's economic rebound under Thatcher that the Labour Party ultimately dispensed with the idea of promoting socialism as an economic model, withdrawing the infamous "Clause IV" of its plank calling for nationalization of industry and wide-scale redistribution of wealth. In addition, Labour has continued Thatcher's union policies.

Much of Europe is incrementally trying to follow Britain's lead. Decades of European experimentation with socialism and the welfare state have given Europe moribund economies with slow growth and high unemployment. But that is changing. In the words of the NYT, "socialism is collapsing in Europe."

And socialism is not merely collapsing economically in Europe, it is also collapsing as a driver of society. Multiculturalism is a natural outgrowth of Marx's deeply distorting view that all of society should be analyzed in terms of the "oppressed and oppressor," and that, within that rubric, Western societies, with a history of colonialism and imperialism, are uniquely sinful oppressors. It is a belief system wholly detached from historical reality.

Euorpean multiculturalism encourages minorities to define themselves by the culture of their nationality or by their religion. And because Marxism holds indigenous Western culture to be irredeemably sinful, multiculturalism requires that non-indigenous cultures be accepted non-judgmentally and, indeed, seems to hold them to be superior to indigenous culture. It deliberately balkanizes society and it is particularly insidious as regards to Islamic minorities in Europe. Yet today, it is widely being acknowledged across Europe that multiculturalism has failed utterly. So says French President Sarkozy, Britain's David Cameron, and Germany's Angela Merkel. Hopefully this rejection of multiculturalism is sufficiently timely to cure the toxin Marxian multiculturalism has released into European society.

B. U.S.

Even as Europe moves away from socialism, Obama is trying to drive the U.S. towards the failed European economic model. Obama has set us on the road to nationalizing one sixth of our economy with Obamacare. Our government is today the majority owner of GM and Chrysler. Obama nationalized the student loan industry, ostensibly for greater efficiency. Moreover, Obama is insinuating the government deeply into our economy with a tsunami of new regulations, particularly in the areas of the environment and finance. Then there was the recent power grab to regulate the internet. Obama is ideologically committed to punishing the rich through taxes and redistributing their wealth for the 'greater good' of society. And lastly, Obama is showing a penchant for crony capitalism, picking winners and losers in the marketplace. If that is not incremental economic socialism, then nothing is.

It is not just Obama that is infected with the Marxist philosophy - it pervades the entire left wing in the U.S. The left in America today is not a monolith, but rather a mosaic of pigeon holed permanent victim groups - a toxin directly derived from Marx's oppressed / oppressor analytical framework. It is the maintenance of these 'oppressed' permanent victim groups - be they minority groups, gays, women, or public sector employees - that is the raison d'etre of the modern Democrat party. And indeed, the central financial foundation of the Democrats is taxpayer money laundered through public sector unions, the essential building block of Marx's march toward a communist utopia. This is not to say that a majority of Democrats are agitating to establish full blown socialism in America today. But it is to say that to understand our modern left and their trajectory, the first step is to read Marx. Step two is to study history in order to understand what will happen to our nation if they are allowed to pull our nation along that trajectory.

V. The War On Religion

Central to Marx's goal to entirely remake society was to drive Judaism and Christianity from society. Western culture, morality, history and societal structures are inextricably intertwined with the Judeo-Christian religions. Indeed, one could say that, at least until the Enlightenment, the history of Christianity, and to a lesser extent Judaism, were one and the same as the history of Western civilization. Thus Marx became an implacable enemy of these religions and started a war on them that the left continues to this day:

. . . [S]ocialists have warred against Christianity and Judaism for over two centuries. Indeed, when socialism was born in the crucible of the French Revolution, one of the first acts of the Revolutionary government was to initiate a systematic and brutal war on the Catholic Church and its clergy.

The left has waged this war against Christianity and Judaism ever since. Karl Marx, socialism's greatest philosopher, famously wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the "opium of the people" and that "[t]he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." The British socialist party wrote in their 1911 manifesto that "it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." In America, the socialist left has used activist Courts as an a means of removing all aspects of Christianity from the public square while in Britain, the Labour Party is demoting Christianity and deconstructing the Anglican Church. . . .

With the left's partial success in their war on Christianity has come an interesting phenomena - the search for something to replace Christianity among the newly secularized. It would seem that we humans are hard wired to look for what amounts to a religion to give ourselves a moral mooring and a greater purpose in life. Socialist governments recognized this. Indeed, the first socialists in France substituted government sponsored cult movements in place of the Catholic Church. In Communist countries, where raw police power was used - not wholly successfully - to crush Christianity and Judaism, socialism itself was raised to the level of a religion complete with a sainthood - the quasi-deification of communist leaders as part of a cult of personality. Catholics had the Shroud of Turin; Soviets had the mummy of Lenin.

On an individual level, the same search for a substitute is happening in the West. Many of the secular left today embrace environmentalism as a religion - and indeed, it was but a few months ago that UNEP explicitly called for the global warming movement to be pushed as a religious alternative to Christianity. Still others embrace the airy spiritualism of New Age thought.

All of this has existential ramifications for Western society. For the better part of two millennium, the Judeo-Christian ethic has provided a rock solid framework for morality at the heart of Western society - one that puts maximum value on each individual human life and one that provides moral clarity in such things as Christianity's Golden Rule and Judaism's "Great Commandment." Take that mooring away from the ancient expressions of our deity and all morality then becomes dependant on what any particular person or government defines as the greater good.

When governments and individuals can define by their whim what is moral or immoral, what is desirable and what is punishable, human life is almost inevitably devalued. Certainly Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot, between them responsible for the murder of well over a hundred million people in the 20th century, held to socialist belief systems that devalued human life and elevated in its stead political ideology. Many in the green movement argue that man is a parasite on the world and call for strictly limiting his impact using authoritarian means - including population control, forced sterilization and other such methods. . .

The bottom line is, regardless whether one believes in Judaism or Christianity, we will pay a very heavy price indeed for jettisoning them as the bedrock of Western society. Yet that is precisely what the left has sought for over two centuries, promising in their stead a secular heaven on earth. Ironically, should they fully succeed, history teaches us that their promised earthly heaven will be far more likely to resemble biblical hell.

VI. Conclusion

The allure of Marx's socialist philosophy, despite its utter failure as an economic model and its evil, bloody history as a social and political model, is very much alive. People embrace its utopian ideals wholly irrepsective of historical reality. It is fair to say that, since Marx first published the Communist Manifesto, the clash between Marxist social and economic ethos on one hand and traditional Western freedoms and capitalism on the other has been a reoccurring and often predominant theme across all sectors of society and culture. And indeed, what we see happening in Wisconsin today, pitting democracy against labor unions, is simply one more event in the history of that conflict. Marx may be dead, but his ghost still very much haunts us today.

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