Blogs For Victory

It becomes ever more necessary, as this news story indicates:

Thousands of Connecticut Catholics rallied at the state capitol on Wednesday to protest a proposed state law which would have reorganized the financial and pastoral structure of the Catholic Church.

Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport had warned that the bill “directly attacks the structure of the Roman Catholic Church.” The bill itself requires that parish pastors report to the board of directors about all “administrative and financial matters.” The archbishop or bishop would serve as an “ex-officio” member and would lose his voting rights.

Bishop Lori argued the bill, S.B. 1098, would remove any real relationship between the parish and the bishop and would turn pastors into “figureheads.”

S.B. 1098 was pulled on Tuesday, following protests from Catholics and others who saw it as a clearly unconstitutional proposal.

The bill was introduced by two openly homosexual members of the Connecticut legislature who are strong supporters of gay marriage and long-time critics of the Catholic Church. The bill was allegedly submitted at the request of constituents who wanted more accountability in the use of Church funds. At bottom, however, it was an attempt to make the Catholic Church illegal in the State of Connecticut – and thus the bill, had it been turned into law, would have either been struck down by the State courts, or by the US federal courts, if that proved necessary. But this is just one of many attacks on religious freedom, and we need to counter it. The best way to do this is to enact a “Religious Liberty Restoration Act”.

Such an Act would spell out just what governments are prohibited from doing regarding religion – and I think the law should clearly state that outside of concerns for public health and safety, government must not interfere in religious practices at all. For too long now religious liberty has been chipped away at to the point where now we see this clear attempt to wreck a particular religion. It is only a matter of time before someone re-writes a hate crimes law to state that Christian teaching on subjects such as marriage, birth control, abortion and homosexuality are “hate speech”. Think it can’t happen in a free country? Its already happening in Canada and Europe – those places so admired by our own left.

To really put teeth into such an Act, what it must do is provide sanctions – civil and criminal – for anyone who seeks by legislation or judicial action to limit the scope of free exercise outside the needs of public health and safety. So, when some busybody of an atheist tries to force a school to prohibit a church group from using the facilities – as other groups are allowed to do – that busybody would be liable for jail time and punitive damages. Such provisions would make busybodies pause – they like using the courts and back-channel legislative action in order to harass religion, but I doubt very much they’d like to put their own money and liberty at stake over such a thing.

Liberals have given us all the freedom we want – provided that freedom is the freedom to have sex, view pornography and kill unborn children. The rest of liberty – the real liberty – liberals have steadily curtailed. Our freedom of association, speech, property rights, rights of self defense and a host of other liberties have been been hemmed about with progressively greater restrictions, and its time we take a stand and insist that even if liberals are afraid of freedom, we’re not and we’re not going to let them take it away from us.