Some firsts tell us we may be in our last days. A good example is what’s billed as our country’s first satanic monument on public property (shown). The handiwork of some Massachusetts Satanists, it was approved in May for The Satanic Temple and will be erected in the Veterans Memorial Park in Belle Plaine, Minnesota.
The Daily Caller provides some more background:
The Satanic Temple’s efforts to gain approval for a Satanic monument in the park started, ironically, with a Christian monument’s installation. The Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a complaint about the monument, which featured a soldier kneeling before a cross. The city of Belle Plaine ordered the removal of the monument in January, but reversed the order when citizens rallied to protest, according to the Star Tribune. The city then designated the park as a limited public forum, or “free speech zone,” in which any faith could be displayed. Satanists saw their chance and pounced on it.
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The work of outside agitators bullying a small locality into submission, it’s unsurprising the monument has little, if any, local support. As CBS Minnesota reports:
“They said they were putting it up and I did not like it,” said resident Donna Karnitz.
City Councilmember Cary Coop says he voted against the designated free speech area.
“I don’t think there’s too many Satanists around here, but it’s free speech,” Coop said.
He says they anticipated other groups coming in.
This has already happened elsewhere. For example, in the central rotunda of Florida’s Capitol Building, “an atheist group hung a winter solstice banner celebrating the Bill of Rights and freedom from religion. Inspired, another atheist built a Festivus pole made of beer cans, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster added a small pile of holy noodles to the capitol’s halls,” as Slate reported in 2014. Moreover, a pentagram reading “May the children hail Satan” was erected in Boca Raton’s Sanborn Square last Christmas.
While there are true worshippers of Darkness among us, most of those advocating non-traditional or sacrilegious displays on public property don’t actually believe in the ideas the symbols represent. Rather, they’re engaging in a religious-realm Cloward-Piven Strategy, hoping to get all displays eliminated — with Christian ones being the real targets — by overwhelming the system with unrealistic demands.
For certain, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster could be followed by the Church of the Flightless Spaghetti Monster, and Festivus by a million other things from Pests-R-Us. Is making such a mockery of our civilization what the Founders intended?
In truth, Councilman Coop is wrong when saying this is “free speech.” The Constitution guarantees only that the government won’t trample our speech.
It does not guarantee that the government will facilitate our speech.
And this is precisely what exhibition on public property does.
Unfortunately, less than one percent of the population — oddballs, activists, and enabling judges — are trampling the rights of the majority because of the majority’s apathy and ignorance.
Consider the also common argument that everything from Puritanism to paganism must have a public-square place because of the “separation between church and state”; in reality, that phrase is not in our Constitution.
It is in the 1936 Soviet Constitution, however.
Our Constitution states merely that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” As “Congress” indicates, this constrains only the central government’s legislative branch.
And what of Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation”? Found in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson made clear that his wall wasn’t between government and religion, but the feds and the states — the latter of which had, in fact, established churches at our nation’s founding.
Of course, usurpative judges conjured up the “Theory of Incorporation,” a judicial rationalization applying the Bill of Rights to all levels of government despite the First Amendment, again, clearly specifying “Congress.” Yet even if we accept the theory and (unwarranted) judicial supremacy, it’s not relevant because mere religious expression in government is not religious establishment by government.
As I wrote last year:
History tells the tale. Prayers before government assemblies have been common since colonial times. Furthermore, Congress opened with prayer in 1789, beginning a tradition that continues to this day, and has an official chaplain. Even more significantly, every official chaplain has been Christian, and the prayers were exclusively Christian until very recently (and they generally still are Christian). And this is the point: The men who created Congress and the Establishment Clause — writing that Congress shall not establish religion — also consistently welcomed exclusively Christian prayers in Congress. So how does one make the case that such an action violates the clause’s true meaning?
You’d have to claim that the Founding Fathers didn’t know what they meant when writing the First Amendment!
Moreover, even the modern Supreme Court has acknowledged this. As I also reported, “In the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway, the Court found, wrote USA Today, that even though the town had ‘mostly Christian clergy delivering frequently sectarian prayers before an audience that often included average citizens with business to conduct,’ these ‘facts didn’t make what the Greece Town Board did unconstitutional.’”
In other words, as with speech, our Constitution guarantees us the right to free exercise of religion.
It doesn’t guarantee us that the government will showcase our religion — or insulate snowflakes from religious expression of which they’re intolerant.
This brings us to the problem: It’s not that we’re not tolerant. We’re just tolerant of the wrong things — such as the denuding of our culture, Constitution, and national character by the enemies within.
Photo of monument: Satanic Temple
