The HBObama Channel's History of the Founding Fathers 2013, unless . . .
While the Chicago Sun Times offers a silly report on Vichy Priest(s) ( nod to Tom Roeser's genius) who refused to read Cardinal George's powerful condemnation of Obama's HHS Contraception Mandate ( only one priest is reported by-the-way), Chicago's Father Robert Barron presents a scholarly and pastoral expose of President Obama's secularist slight-of-hand within the larger secularist war on faith in general. Click my post title for this important article,
This might be a pretty good summary from Father Barron's work.
The secularist state recognizes that its principle enemy is the Church Catholic. Accordingly, it wants Catholicism off the public stage and relegated to a private realm where it cannot interfere with secularism's totalitarian agenda. I realize that in using that particular term, I'm dropping a rhetorical bomb, but I am not doing so casually.
There is a modality of secular liberalism that is not aggressive toward religion, but rather recognizes that religion makes an indispensable contribution to civil society. This more tolerant liberalism allows, not only for freedom of worship, but also for real freedom of religion, which is to say, the expression of religious values in the public square and the free play of religious ideas in the public conversation. Most of our founding fathers advocated just this type of liberalism.
But there is another modality of secularism -- sadly on display in the current administration -- that is actively aggressive toward religion, precisely because it sees religion as its primary rival in the public arena. Appreciating certain moral convictions as disvalues-think here especially of Catholic teachings concerning sexuality -- it seeks to eliminate religion or at the very least to privatize and hence marginalize it. In doing so, it indeed reveals itself as totalitarian, for it allows no room in the public space for anything but itself.
The reason that the Bill of Rights is so important is that it holds off the tendency, inherent in any government, toward totalitarianism, even if that means the totalitarianism of the majority. The very first amendment, of course, guarantees the free exercise of religion in our country. Our founders obviously feared that even a democratic system, predicated upon a repudiation of tyranny, could become so tyrannical itself that it would seek to intrude upon the sacred realm of the religious conscience.
That is a powerful quartet of paragraphs.
President Obama should be in for the fight of his political life. Vichy Catholics are with the President. The Catholic Church and others are all in for a nasty political and ideological brawl.
