They Want to Own Your Conscience

Can you imagine what would happen to this country if liberals could have their way with the Constitution? Have you ever really thought about the host of evils it protects us from?

Well, the California legislature has just reminded us.

They have passed a resolution—the Constitution forbids them making it a law—blaming “religious people” for the high rate of suicide among persons who practice homosexuality. If we take the Bible at all seriously, we know that such practices are sin. Therefore it’s our fault that the “gays” aren’t happy. The operative phrase in this document is that our religion “has caused” the suicides.

And so “The Legislature calls upon all Californians to embrace the individual and social benefits of family and community acceptance” of homosexual acting-out. But “benefits”? What benefits? You mean, like, “Look at all the money Sodom and Gomorrah saved on their heating bills”? We are not told what those benefits are.

They can’t make a law compelling us to “embrace” this particular species of antichrist because our First Amendment establishes religious liberty, not compulsion, as the law of the land. It’s against the law for any government to tell us what we must believe or not believe. This law means we can’t force atheists to believe in Jesus Christ, who never forced anyone, and they can’t force Christians not to believe in Him—however much, however passionately, they may want to.

So the California legislature can’t force Christians and Jews to tear pages out of their Bibles, or ordain unrepentant sexual sinners as clergy and elders, can’t force churches to perform same-sex parodies of marriage. They can only try to scare us with a resolution. For as long as the First Amendment stands as written, it is a roadblock to them.

We might be tempted to think, “Oh, if only we had the power, instead of them! Then we could force all those liberal ‘affirming’ churches not to do those things!” The Constitution would then be a roadblock to us—if a Christian conscience failed to hold us back from lusting to be tyrants over other people’s souls. I like to think that that’s the difference between Christians and secular statists.

It’s true that once upon a time, Christians did persecute others, especially other Christians, for their beliefs. It was because of this history that the First Amendment was written in the first place. Our founders tried to make sure that no Henry VIII would ever rise up in America. Henry murdered Catholics because they were Catholics. His daughter Mary murdered Protestants because they were Protestants. We didn’t want that sort of thing to happen here.

But the Far Left crazies in the California legislature have gone as far as they can lawfully go toward taking ownership of people’s consciences, trying to shame them into embracing beliefs and practices they hold to be morally corrupt. That they can go no further is solely due to our Constitution and the wisdom, and humanity, of our country’s founders.

Lest we forget, the 2016 Democrat platform included a plank authorizing the attorney general to “investigate”—and why investigate anything if you’re not going to punish it?—“climate change denial.” A Democrat president, with a Democrat Congress, would have done that in a heartbeat: made it a crime to take one side of a scientific controversy, but not the other.

Inasmuch as it’s humanly possible, our founders tried to protect all Americans’ life, liberty, and property while preserving a maximum degree of personal freedom. To an extent greater than that attained by any other country in the world, they succeeded.

We thank God for that.

I have discussed this and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in and visit; a single click will take you there. My articles can also be found on www.chalcedon.edu/.

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net