My wife and I are going to start our day tomorrow the way we usually start every Sunday.
We’ll get up. Have our morning coffee. We’ll eat a light breakfast. Read the newspaper. We’ll get cleaned up. Get dressed. Then we’ll go to church … more than likely.
We’ll pray. Sing a few hymns. Listen to the preacher deliver his message from Scripture. Pray some more. Then we’ll leave the church and go through the rest of our day.
I keep wondering in the context of this hyper-heated presidential campaign: Which religious liberties have my wife and I — as red-blooded, taxpaying, patriotic Americans — lost?
One of the remaining Republican candidates for president keeps insisting that our “religious liberties” are being peeled away.
Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz keeps harping on the notion that “we are one liberal justice away from having our religious liberties” stripped away. That’s what he says. The crowds to whom he speaks eat it up. He says he won’t “compromise away our religious liberties.”
Thanks, Ted. From where I sit, young man, we’re still quite free in this country to worship as we see fit. Or not worship. The Constitution that Cruz and others say they revere spells it out quite clearly: Government shall make no law that establishes a state religion. That means, as most of us understand it, that we are free to adhere to any deity of our choice.
You want a real threat to religious liberty? How about banning individuals from entering this country solely because they happen to be Muslims? Yes, I know that Cruz opposes the idea put forward by his fellow Republican candidate for president, Donald J. Trump. But if he’s going to raise hell from the campaign stump, he ought to take his best shot at that patently idiotic and unconstitutional idea.
My family has made our religious choice. We did so all on our own. Our religious liberties are quite intact and I am quite certain they are as strong as they’ve ever been.
I thank God every day for those liberties.
So let’s quit dangling those dubious threats, Sen. Cruz, to the liberties that our Constitution’s very First Amendment guarantees for all of us.
Cruz and others suffering from some form of political paranoia might perceive those threats to be real.
I don’t.
