dChan
Anonymous ID: f094a0 Jan. 30, 2020, 8:40 a.m. No.7965173   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>5334 >>5566

Of course, the point of flak like this is to polarize the target and thus make him ineffective through clouds of mistrust. A parallel effort has been underway much longer against the nation’s first freedom: the duty to obey God before men. Thus in her own attack article against Barr last month in The New York Times, Katherine Stewart put the words religious liberty and religious freedom in scare quotes, even though these are longstanding natural rights that enjoy U.S. legal protection for very good reasons that include staunching bigotry. The ignorant scare quotes are becoming common in even outlets that style themselves objective news sources.

“[I]t is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion,” Stewart writes:

In Maryland, the department rushed to defend taxpayer funding for a religious school that says same-sex marriage is wrong. In Maine, it is defending parents suing over a state law that bans religious schools from obtaining taxpayer funding to promote their own sectarian doctrines.

In these and other cases, Mr. Barr has embraced wholesale the ‘religious liberty’ rhetoric of today’s Christian nationalist movement. When religious nationalists invoke ‘religious freedom,’ it is typically code for religious privilege. The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.

Stewart makes an error of omission in her description of the First Amendment. The clause concerning religion reads, in full: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” A full quotation undoes her conclusion that the Constitution prohibits religious people from equal access to public funds. That is not only historically and legally inaccurate, it’s obviously textually inaccurate from any unbiased person’s plain reading.

In other words, she’s doing exactly what Barr says she’s doing, while pretending that she is not. Stewart is making a “secular effort to drive religion out of our lives” and trying to impose her values on religious people while “not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.” Her values say that only pagans — people with atheist, pantheist, syncretist, or agnostic religious beliefs — may fully access public goods. People with theistic religious beliefs may not. This is not equality or tolerance — it is prejudice.

 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/30/barr-the-real-people-trying-to-impose-their-values-on-others-are-militant-secularists/