In its relentless drive to secularize our society, The New York Times continues to distort the First Amendment.
An editorial in today’s paper notes that the Supreme Court is hearing arguments involving Pleasant Grove City, Utah, which has a Ten Commandments monument in a public park but refuses to allow a cult called Summum to erect its own memorial.
Because the City “elevated one religion, traditional Christianity, over another, Summum,” it violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against an Establishment of Religion, The Times maintains. “The founders regarded this sort of religious preference as so odious that they included a specific provision in the First Amendment prohibiting it.”
The New York Times probably thinks the Bill of Rights was drafted by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
In reality, the Establishment Clause was intended to prohibit a state church, like the Church of England. If The Founders thought giving one religion preference was odious, why was Congress’s first official act to hire a Christian chaplain? And why did the first Congress appropriate sums of money for Christian missionaries to the Indian tribes?
What about “In God We Trust” on our currency and “One Nation Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance – which clearly give preference to Judeo-Christian tradition over Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Summumism?
The New York Times gives the game away when it insists that public property “must be open to all religions on an equal basis – or open to none at all” (emphasis added). In other words, a town that chooses to display the Ten Commandments – which are sacred to 90% of the American people and an integral part of our nation’s heritage – has to give equal space to every other faith and New Age sect that’s out there.
Soon, parks and other public places would be overrun with monuments to Shiva, Baal, the Mother Earth, Wicca and the Great Pumpkin. By forcing municipalities to make this choice, The New York Times intends to affect its real purpose – driving religion from the public square and severing our nation from its Judeo-Christian roots.
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