Church Wars
Church Wars: Obama places more than Catholics in the crosshairs
Why did President “Present” choose this precise moment to take a stand? He has the unfettered abortion crowd already in his hip pocket, so why tackle the Catholic Church and risk such a critical interest group? Some are suggesting his stand is simply a sop to his female staff that has felt slighted during the majority of his presidency.
It just doesn’t add up. Even after stumbling into this hole, he could have simply said, “I tried, but what are you going to do? The constitution specifically prohibits my interfering with the internal matters of the Church and its institutions.” And therein lies the rub.
Do you really think that the same President who is constantly reminding us how difficult his job is due to the constitutionally mandated separation of powers would then agree to share his hard-won power? It is not enough to simply put us on the path to a single payer health system, to enshrine his vision of a socialist utopia; the actual caregivers have to be secular also. And that is why he is standing firm now. He simply has to take a stand now, not on women’s rights, not on reproductive rights, but on the much more important issue of what constitutes a church? If the constitution is going to hinder him from controlling churches, he has to make sure that the rulings apply as narrowly as possible. So he has to separate the Church from its operations. By the time he is done, the majority of secular Americans will believe that the Founding Fathers really only cared about protecting the government from the evil Church and that the government is the one true place to turn when you are in need.
To be fair, the Church made its initial mistake a long time ago. Churches so desired the advantages of their tax-free status that they allowed the government to start defining what speech was acceptable in a church in order to maintain that status. Instead of embracing their membership in a very exclusive club of co-equals with the government, similar to the American Indian’s Country within a Country, they traded their constitutional independence away. Instead of Houses of God occasionally claiming sanctuary, they should actually be sanctuaries. Pastors should be free to speak truth to power from the pulpit without regard for their tax-free status. If conditions warrant or if God leads churches on a series of revivals throughout the land proclaiming the gospel, but also pointing out the failings of the civilian government, so be it. They are still a church and they still exist in a state of constitutional protection. As churches quietly acquiesced while additional barriers and hurdles were added a subtle change began to occur. The government, with the encouragement of the church, had begun to go into competition with the church. Since both institutions were based upon Judeo-Christian principles, many pastors across the land quickly transferred the onerous duties of caring for their poor, sick, elderly, widows and orphans over to the institution that could go beyond begging for compassion to actually demanding compassion.
Even as secularism crept into our society, both the church and the government had their flings and dalliances with the new intellectual toy. But the allure of being fed from the teat of the government proved too strong for the church when it began to realize that compromise after compromise were achieved by the church agreeing to restrict how they did their job. If there is one thing that government does understand, it’s the golden rule. “He who has the gold rules.”
As forces inimical to the church’s mission began to stack the government’s bureaucratic layers they began to perfect the dismantling of the Church’s institutional protections. They started simply by saying that any organization that takes care of children must follow certain guidelines. Because it was for the sake of the children and because Churches are composed of generally law-abiding citizens, there was very little pushback. Feeling their oats, they then decided to tackle Church leaders who spoke out from the pulpit on political matters. Do it too much and you lose your tax-exempt status. This one was a two-fer, you got to trample on both free speech rights and to narrow the efficacy of the Church’s constitutional protections. Again, some Churches complained quietly, but for the most part, they went along.
Having established the pattern, they then began to apply it over and over again, repeatedly adding barriers to churches carrying out their missions. Why? It’s simple. Simply having the people dependent is not enough to guarantee re-election. Instead, you need to make the people dependent on the government. If there is another alternative out there, that alternative must be annihilated.
There is a lot of play being given to Martin Niemöller’s famous story of how – “When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me,
There was no one left to speak out.”
We must take a stand now and act preemptively to elect a completely new leadership across the board in Washington. And we must keep at it, until we have rooted out the rot at the base of the vine, the federal bureaucracy. The Midas ad tagline of “You can pay me now, or, you can pay me later” has never been truer. Right now, with the simple donation of some cash and spending time as campaign volunteers, we can right our course. If we delay, the price will be the blood of ourselves and our children. No one wins in a revolution, one can only hope to survive.
John Hall PhD
As forces inimical to the church’s mission began to stack the government’s bureaucratic layers they began to perfect the dismantling of the Church’s institutional protections. They started simply by saying that any organization that takes care of children must follow certain guidelines. Because it was for the sake of the children and because Churches are composed of generally law-abiding citizens, there was very little pushback. Feeling their oats, they then decided to tackle Church leaders who spoke out from the pulpit on political matters. Do it too much and you lose your tax-exempt status. This one was a two-fer, you got to trample on both free speech rights and to narrow the efficacy of the Church’s constitutional protections. Again, some Churches complained quietly, but for the most part, they went along.
Having established the pattern, they then began to apply it over and over again, repeatedly adding barriers to churches carrying out their missions. Why? It’s simple. Simply having the people dependent is not enough to guarantee re-election. Instead, you need to make the people dependent on the government. If there is another alternative out there, that alternative must be annihilated.
There is a lot of play being given to Martin Niemöller’s famous story of how – “When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me,
There was no one left to speak out.”
We must take a stand now and act preemptively to elect a completely new leadership across the board in Washington. And we must keep at it, until we have rooted out the rot at the base of the vine, the federal bureaucracy. The Midas ad tagline of “You can pay me now, or, you can pay me later” has never been truer. Right now, with the simple donation of some cash and spending time as campaign volunteers, we can right our course. If we delay, the price will be the blood of ourselves and our children. No one wins in a revolution, one can only hope to survive.
John Hall PhD
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