A little while ago, about a month to be exact, I ran across this item in the admirable web site, Today’s Martyrs:
“In the United States the Georgia Department of Public Health is being sued by Dr. Eric Walsh. In addition to his medical work Dr. Walsh is a part-time minister. He had been hired by the department in May of 2015 and then had the offer of employment revoked several days later, after the department became aware of – rather, hunted down – the contents of the homilies he had delivered in his church. The homilies in question concerned traditional Christian morality. This is an almost unbelievable attack on religious liberty, and shows that the anti-religious among us who want ‘freedom of religion’ emasculated into ‘freedom of worship’ really don’t want freedom of worship either.”
I’ve been mulling this over for weeks now, and combining it with a statement by one of the presumptive nominees for candidate for President of the United States. This public figure has said that religious teaching which opposes the marriage of persons of the same gender will need to be changed.
Such intervention, on the legal face of it, would be unconstitutional, if it were intervention by any law of Congress. This legislative body is prohibited from interfering in the exercise of religion (see the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
How then can any politician foresee how a change can be worked into a fundamental tenet of any known religion? Would it be by executive order? How much political power and to what degree would be necessary to alter religious and social custom which has endured for time out of mind?
Is it conceivable that so much power over people could ever be established even in a dictatorship, never mind a democratic republic?
Are we contemplating the sort of social control that only a novelist like Orwell could imagine? It would require modern techniques and a form of official terror as well.
Meanwhile, see Today’s Martyrs here for a glimpse of contemporary assaults on religious freedom:
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