Leftists: Establishing a Religion

In the case of Jack Philips, the baker who doesn’t want to be forced to support a gay “wedding,” leftists have revealed their freedom-hating fascist fanaticism and their desire to establish their faith as a government-mandated religion.

Religion interacts with politics by defining moral and behavioral codes. For example, Catholics believe murder is wrong, a moral code, and that you shouldn’t eat meat on the Fridays of Lent (a penance that was ended in 1984, but is recently making a comeback), a behavioral code. Hence establishing a religion in the context of the 1st Amendment would involve providing preferential treatment to the moral and behavioral code of one particular faith, as the English government did with the Church of England.

The Constitution was specifically designed to provide freedom of religion while preventing the government from picking one religion as the winner. Historically Americans were more divided based on behavioral issues than on morality; the Ten Commandments has always been something most Americans agree on. As a result, the morality of our laws hasn’t been much of an issue, apart from slavery, of course, until very recently. Even better, most Americans have no interest in using the power of the government to impose their behavioral beliefs on the rest of America; Catholics don’t want to force people to eat fish on Fridays, Jews don’t want pork banned from restaurants, and Protestants don’t want to require people to go to services.

More here