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Courthouse covers over quote about Christianity
In response to a complaint by the Anti-Defamation League (how readily everyone dances to their tune!), a California courtroom will cover over a seventy-year-old wall panel containing a Theodore Roosevelt quote: “The true Christian is the true citizen.” Alison Mayersohn of the ADL said that the quote could easily be perceived as “equating Christianity and good citizenship.” To anyone who knows or cares anything about American history, the remark is counterintuitive. When John Adams said that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” what religion do you think he was he talking about? Can you have a religious people, without a religion? Which raises a further question: if the courtroom had displayed the Adams quote instead of the Roosevelt quote, would the ADL have protested that, too? Would they have complained that the quote could easily be perceived as equating religiosity with good citizenship, and therefore as excluding non-believers?
We are coming to the end of the road that was unintentionally marked out when the American Founders made the liberal principles of our system explicit in our Founding documents, while leaving its non-liberal underpinnings, such as religion and morality, merely implicit. Of course, Adams and the other Founders made frequent comments about the indispensable role of these non-liberal principles in our society and government, but since those statements were issued only as expressions of personal opinion and were not part of the Founding documents themselves, they have not had the same authority in our system that the liberal principles have had. The result is the ongoing and accelerating movement to make our political society comprehensively liberal, which requires the removal of all Christian symbols and references from the public square. Email entry |