Keep It Pithy Page 3

  The upshot of all this is that it’s safe to say few, if any, citizens are enlisting in the S-P corps in East St. Louis or South Central Los Angeles. But, again, not many blacks are waving the traditional flag, either. It would take a strong black leader who understands that the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as a return to discipline and personal accountability, would greatly aid the advancement of African Americans. Until such a leader arrives, most black Americans will remain disengaged from the culture war that is raging around them. And that’s a shame.

  FOUR

  RELIGION UNDER ATTACK

  Who Cares? You Can Hear a Pin Drop

  Your religious freedom means that I can’t tell you what to believe.

  My religious freedom means that you can’t stop me from talking about what I believe. Just don’t listen, if you don’t want to.

  I have often written about my faith; it’s a large part of who I am.

  As far as your personal religious conviction, that is completely up to you. But I will say this: Used in the correct way, religion can be a force that makes your life more worthwhile. It can make the bad times bearable and the good times more satisfying. Spirituality looks out for you because it brings you out of yourself and into a realm where the welfare of other people becomes as important as your own.… That kind of worldview will allow you to build relationships with people who will indeed look out for you even as you are looking out for them.

  And now for the completely ridiculous …

  Why did the word “Christmas” suddenly become controversial? Why did I have to spend quality TV time on this issue? … The answer is the semi-successful perversion of the U.S. Constitution. The ACLU and other secular-progressive groups constantly say they are challenging public displays of Christmas and other spiritual expositions to protect Americans from the emergence of a “theocratic” government—that is, a governmental system driven by religious thought and judgments. The tired “separation of church and state” argument is used again and again to justify attacks on spirituality in the public square.

  But the “separation” argument is one big lie, a bogus piece of propaganda cooked up by an intentional misreading of the intent of the Constitution.

  This “wall of separation” falsehood has, however, been lovingly embraced by the secular media and foisted upon the American public with a ferocious intensity.

  (photo credit 4.1)

  Please trust me when I tell you that, just a few years ago, I never envisioned being a culture warrior on behalf of Christmas. To me, Christmas has always been the most magical time of the year. I remember as a small child sitting on the stairs early Christmas morning before anyone else was up, staring down at the scene before me. Santa Claus had come! All the presents were neatly wrapped and perfectly placed under the tree (a real one). I was mesmerized. What treasures would my sister and I be getting? I just sat there and soaked it all in. I remember the moments vividly. Why would anyone want to mess with Christmas?

  But in recent years, the traditions of Christmas began to be portrayed in some quarters as somehow “controversial,” which really teed me off. So, in the fall of ’05, I set out to alert the nation that Christmas traditions were under siege and behind the action was a well-thought-out S-P campaign to marginalize the national holiday (which was almost unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by President U. S. Grant on June 28, 1870).

  Night after night on my TV program, I presented the evidence: Giant retailers like Sears (and others) had banned the mention of the word “Christmas” in seasonal advertising. The Lowe’s Company told its store managers to sell “holiday” trees, not Christmas trees. The city of Boston changed the name of its Christmas tree on the Common to “Holiday Tree.” (It was changed back after Mayor Thomas Menino intervened.) There were scores of other examples.…

  [Simply put, the ACLU began targeting Christmas. They lost in court on several occasions but won in the long run because small communities were intimidated by the expense of fighting the group’s lawsuits against various Christmas displays, including a visit from Saint Nick.…] Eight out of ten of us in America are Christian and celebrate Christmas as a “religious occasion.” But in the interest of inclusion I suggest that we allow the S-P movement to celebrate their version of Christmas. Let’s call it “Feel Good Day.” And a Happy Feel Good Day to you!

  While the religious aspect—Christianity—is certainly in the forefront of the Christmas controversy, the political agenda in the war on Christmas has remained largely hidden. It is a decidedly covert operation, in other words. In fact, many people were surprised when I said on TV and radio that politics, not religion, was the driving force behind the attempt to keep Christmas behind closed doors.

  Here’s my explanation in a nutshell: Almost every social change the secular-progressive movement wants to achieve is opposed by religious Americans. Therefore, the more the S-Ps can diminish religious influence in America, the faster their agenda can become a reality. For example, the S-Ps are furious that gay marriage initiatives keep getting voted down, even in the most liberal states, and believe that the primary opposition comes from organized religion rallying their flocks to oppose homosexual nuptials with sin-based arguments.…

  So, for the S-P agenda to succeed, religion in America must be deemphasized, just as it already has been in Western Europe and Canada, where secular-progressives have made huge gains.… Goal number one is to secularize the American public school system in order to drive children away from religion and into the S-P camp. And what is the most wondrous display of religion worldwide? Why, Christmas, of course. Little kids seeing a manger display just might develop a curiosity about this baby Jesus person. What’s this Christmas deal all about, anyway? There is no danger of that happening with winter solstice or with a holiday tree. Is there?

  (photo credit 4.2)

  With no moral shield, millions of American kids will fail.… The secularists don’t care; they want children to be at the mercy of a materialistic society and a greedy media. They want kids to rely solely on parents who are often irresponsible and self-destructive. Right now all we can do is pray for the kids and fight the secularists hand to hand.

  And if you want some empirical evidence to back up that opinion, listen to this: A study of college students seeking psychological counseling has found that their emotional difficulties are far more complex and more severe than those observed in the past. Researchers at Kansas State University studied students from 1989 to 2001 and concluded that those seeking help for depression doubled during that time period. Also, the percentage of students taking some type of psychiatric medication increased twofold.

  That trend is not limited just to Kansas. In a 2002 national survey, more than 80 percent of 274 directors of counseling centers said they thought the number of students with severe psychological disorders had increased over the previous five years.

  Now, you can argue all day long why this is happening, but I’ll give you one huge reason: Many young Americans simply do not have a force in their lives that can relieve their emotional suffering. They are drifting away from our religious traditions—and religion can be that force, at least in part. If you are able to believe that a higher power will look out for you and will balance bad times with good times, your stress level will not get out of control. Religious faith is generally bad for the “shrink” business, but honest mental health workers know what’s going on. “People just don’t seem to have the resources to draw upon emotionally to the degree that they used to,” the director of counseling at the University of Nebraska, Dr. Robert Pomeroy, told the New York Times. “What would once have been a difficult patch for someone is now a full-blown crisis.”

  The rise in dysfunction parallels the rise in secularism, no question about it.

  There’s a reason that the cross is the symbol of Christianity. It is a powerful statement that a good man suffered for me, that a just God was looking out for me, and if I lived a good life, I would be rewarded after death. Those beliefs, sincerely held, can get a human being through many hard times.…

  I believe that a concentration of believers has made America a strong, noble country. As I got older and learned more about history, I saw how the Founding Fathers used Judeo-Christian philosophy to forge the Constitution, perhaps the most perspicacious political document ever designed.

  In our personal lives, we do actually enjoy full freedom of religion in this country. But publicly that is no longer so in America. Because of the rise of secularism, a philosophy that argues there is no room for spirituality in the public arena, religious expression in public is under pressure from some in the media and, of course, from the intolerant secularists who hold power in many different quarters. They are definitely not looking out for you.

  One of the biggest frauds ever foisted upon the American people is the issue of separation of church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union, along with legal secularists like Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, are using the Constitution to bludgeon any form of public spirituality. This insidious strategy goes against everything the Founding Fathers hoped to achieve in forming a free, humane society.

  I said “fraud,” and I meant it. Let’s look at some historical facts. There is no question that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and most of the other framers encouraged spirituality in our public discourse. Letters written by these great men show that they believed social stability could be achieved only by a people who embraced a moral God. Time after time in debating the future of America, the Founders pointed out that only a “moral” and “God-fearing” people could meet the demands of individual freedom. That makes perfect sense, because a society that has no fear of God relies solely on civil authority
for guidance. But that guidance can and has broken down. All great philosophers, even the atheists, realized that one of the essential attributes of a civilized people is a belief that good will be rewarded and evil will be punished.

  In 1781, Jefferson said the following words, which are engraved on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

  I wonder what Jefferson would think of the ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California that the word “God” is unconstitutional in the Pledge of Allegiance. I also wonder what ol’ Tom would think of the American Civil Liberties Union suing school districts all over the country to ban the use of the word “God” in school-sanctioned speech. Here’s how ridiculous this whole thing is: At McKinley High School in Honolulu, an official school poem has been recited on ceremonial occasions since 1927. One of the lines mentions a love for God. After the ACLU threatened a lawsuit, that poem was banned from public recitation, a seventy-five-year tradition dissolved within a few weeks.

  (photo credit 4.3)

  This is tragic insanity. To any intellectually honest person, it is apparent that the Founders wanted very much to keep God in the public arena, even uppermost in the thoughts of the populace. What the Founders did not want was any one religion imposed by the government. Jefferson, and Madison in particular, were suspicious of organized religion and of some of the zealots who assumed power in faith-based organizations. But the Founders kept it simple: All law-abiding religions were allowed to practice, but the government would not favor any one above another.

  At the same time, Jefferson in his wisdom predicted that some of the things he and the others wanted for the new country would eventually come under fire. On September 6, 1819, he wrote: “The Constitution … is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

  How prophetic is that?

  [The ACLU’s] true agenda is a secular society. So my question is: Where are the countersuits? Where are the voices of opposition to secularism? Right now they are found primarily on the Christian right, which has been demonized, pardon the pun, as fanatically extreme because of its tendency to condemn its opposition to hellfire. Believe me, I know. Many letters to The Factor give me clear road maps to the devil’s den—and suggest I’m headed there.

  The unrecognized bitter truth about God and America is that organized religion is scared. The churches don’t want to say anything that might endanger their tax-exempt status. They stay out of politics; they actively practice the doctrine of separation of church and state. But that doesn’t mean that good people who believe in the presence of public spirituality have to stay out of the fray. As the Isley Brothers sang, “Fight the Power.”

  Nowhere is the civil impotence of religion in the USA better demonstrated than by the Catholic Church. A whopping 65 million Americans are Catholics, almost 25 percent of the population. Yet the Catholic Church in America, which used to be a tremendous force for effective social change, is now on the defensive and, in many quarters, is an object of public derision.

  Do you know why? Because the Catholic Church stopped looking out for the folks, that’s why. Its leadership is made up primarily of elderly white men who have spent their lives playing politics and currying favor with the conservative zealots in the Vatican. Cardinal Law in Boston, Cardinal Mahony in Los Angeles, and Cardinal Egan in New York are all men of guile, power players who enjoy their wealth and influence. I could list scores of bishops who play the same kind of callous game—that is, amassing power and money while completely forgetting the mission that Jesus died to promote.

  [And there’s more. On January 21, 2013, after continuing pressure from potential prosecutors and litigants, the Los Angeles Archdiocese finally released thousands of pages detailing the cover-ups of abuse in the mid-1980s. Supposedly, that could be only a portion of what will eventually be made public. In one case, an internal disciplinary file of a predatory priest showed that he was protected even after disclosing the rape of an eleven-year-old boy and sexual abuse of as many as seventeen other boys.

  What will happen to the retired cardinal and others involved in this sick enterprise? Perhaps nothing at all. Legal experts say that prosecution is very unlikely because the statute of limitations that applies has run its course.]

  With such leadership, it should come as no surprise that the clerical sex scandal broke wide open. With a few exceptions, like Archbishop Sheehan in New Mexico and now Phoenix, Catholic leadership in America is made up of venal, self-absorbed men who embrace the daily philosophy of “cover my butt.” When Cardinal Law learned of abusive priests, did he leap up in outrage, throw out the perverts, and call the cops? No, he did none of those things, according to his own sworn testimony. Instead, he kept the situation quiet so it wouldn’t hurt his standing in Rome. Thus his solution to child molestation by his priests was to pay the victims off and have them sign a nondisclosure agreement. Then he’d send the priest to rehab and reassign the pervert when he got out so he could be pronounced “cured.” That policy, of course, led to the brutalization of hundreds more children, but did Law care? He dodged and weaved and attacked the press until finally the evidence became so overwhelming that he was publicly humiliated. Then he said he was sorry. But even after the crimes and payoffs became public, the Vatican refused to take aggressive action against Law and the other perversion enablers. And so the reputation of the Catholic Church in America arrived where it is today—completely down the drain.

  The devil and his disciples are thrilled with this series of events, and Jesus must be weeping. He commanded his followers to seek out afflicted children and comfort them. Did Cardinal Law miss that lesson? And what about Pope John Paul? Where was his outrage? In fact, the Pontiff even refused to meet with some of the sexual abuse victims when he traveled to Canada in 2002….

  The self-destruction of the American Catholic Church leaves the field wide open for the antispirituality forces to march in and do what they will. With the Church now lacking in any moral authority outside its own core, the loudest argument in town belongs to the freedom-from-religion spokespeople. And they are winning big.

  My last word on religion is a practical one based on timeless logic: If you live your life subject to the rules of Judeo-Christian tradition (or Buddhist, Islamic, or another religious tradition), then you will do more good than harm on this earth. You will love your neighbor and help other people out. You will not do things that hurt others or yourself.

  So, if everyone was religious wouldn’t the world be a much better place in which to live? Of course it would. And if there is no God at the end of it all, what does it matter? You’re in the ground or scattered to the winds. If the deity is a fraud, you won’t possibly care. You’re gone.

  But while you’re still here, the real trick is to live a successful, positive life.

  (photo credit 4.4)

  To this day, I still go to Sunday Mass. Often, it’s boring. Many times the priest goes on far too long about the mustard seed. Hey, Father, those of us showing up on Sunday have got that down, okay? Fallow ground is not good. Let’s advance the discussion, can we?

  In helping me to determine right from wrong, good from evil, and trying to correct injustice, my Catholic faith is invaluable. In public and on TV and radio, I usually keep my religion to myself, because I have a secular job; I’m a journalist, not an evangelist. But if somebody brings up the subject, I tell him or her what I just told you.

  Religion has been a very positive thing in my life. Without it, I would never have been motivated to expose bad guys and celebrate heroism. Most media people are self-interested and cautious. But I see my job as much more than a big paycheck and a good table at the bistro du jour. I am on a mission.