To start this is yet another post from The New Yorker with whom I agree:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking at the University of Notre Dame last Friday, Barr took \n\u201creligious liberty\u201d as his subject, and he portrayed his \nfellow-believers as a beleaguered and oppressed minority. He was \naddressing, he said, \u201cthe force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the \nassault on religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay; this \nis organized destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Historically illiterate, morally \nobtuse, and willfully misleading, the speech portrays religious people \nin the United States as beset by a hostile band of \u201csecularists.\u201d \nActually, religion is thriving here (as it should be in a free society),\n but Barr claims the mantle of victimhood in order to press for a \nright-wing political agenda. In a potted history of the founding of the \nRepublic, Barr said, \u201cIn the Framers\u2019 view, free government was only \nsuitable and sustainable for a religious people\u2014a people who recognized \nthat there was a transcendent moral order.\u201d Not so. The Framers believed\n that free government was suitable for believers and nonbelievers alike.\n As Justice Hugo Black put it<\/a>\n in 1961, \u201cNeither a State nor the Federal Government can \nconstitutionally force a person to profess a belief or disbelief in any \nreligion. Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements \nwhich aid all religions as against nonbelievers, and neither can aid \nthose religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against \nthose religions founded on different beliefs.\u201d But the real harm of \nBarr\u2019s speech is not what it means for historical debates but what it \nportends for contemporary government policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To start this is yet another post from The New Yorker with whom I agree: Speaking at the University of Notre Dame last Friday, Barr took \u201creligious liberty\u201d as his subject, and he portrayed his fellow-believers as a beleaguered and oppressed minority. He was addressing, he said, \u201cthe force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3792,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions\/3792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}