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" &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; Jindal, a warped bit of presidential timber and the not-entirely-popular governor of Louisiana, went out to California yesterday to give a big speech on &amp;quot;religious liberty&amp;quot; at a library memorializing a man who famously never went to church. For those of you wondering whether &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; is going to take his sippy-cup eschatology on the road in 2016, wonder no longer. Down at home, his impoverish-the-poor tax plan went nowhere, and his charter school program has been exposed as a money pit for charlatans and grifters, and unconstitutional into the bargain, and Louisiana maintains its place at the head of the Thank-God-For Mississippi pack among the states, so there aren&amp;#039;t many cards left for &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; to play except to try and shake loose some of the Bible-bangers from the greasy fingers of Mike Huckabee. And, while he admittedly was never very far from it in the first place, the man has decided to go full wingnut. Up is down. Down is up. Discrimination is freedom. Your freedom is oppressing mine, and maybe god&amp;#039;s, too, so that&amp;#039;s two-against one and we win. Your gay marriage offends against the legacy of Frederick Douglass. Dr. King would have died three years sooner, if your contraception mandate had been around. He found every god-bothering G-spot on the body politic and stroked them until his fingers went numb.  Let me make this explicit: the source and justification for the very existence of the United States of America is and always has been contingent upon the understanding of man as a created being, with a Creator conferring his intrinsic rights - &amp;quot;among [them] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. How we understand and approach that Creator is properly left to the hearts and consciences of every citizen. I am a Catholic Christian. My parents are Hindus. I am blessed to know Baptists, Jews, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and so many more in the rich tapestry of American faiths. And I know men and women who acknowledge no denomination or creed, confess to uncertainty about the Divine, yet look to the richness of nature and the majesty of this world - and wonder, and inwardly seek, the Author of it all. Of course, man is a &amp;quot;created being.&amp;quot; Maybe the way I think of him is that DNA is his creator. (Jindal will have to explain to the women why &amp;quot;man&amp;quot; remains the primary synonym for &amp;quot;human being&amp;quot; here in 2014.) I&amp;#039;m sure &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; would have no problem with that and, in any case, what in the hell does this have to do with anything? Believe what you like. These days we think this diversity of belief is tolerated under our law and Constitution. But that&amp;#039;s wrong. This diversity of belief is the foundation of our law and Constitution America does not sustain and create faith. Faith created and sustains America. President John Adams, in 1798, wrote to Massachusetts militiamen to remind them that &amp;quot;... Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.&amp;quot; Alas for &amp;quot;Bobby,&amp;quot; Adams also told the Barbary Pirates: As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],-and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. John Adams was such a crank, god, or Someone, bless him. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a war against the propositions in the Declaration of Independence: It is a war against the spirit that motivated abolitionism: It is a war against the faith that motivated the Civil Rights struggle: It is a war against the soul of countless acts of charity: It is a war against the conscience that drives social change: It is a war against the heart that binds our neighborhoods together: It is a war against America&amp;#039;s best self, at America&amp;#039;s best moment.&amp;quot; Am I going to have to go into all the religious filigree that was draped around the right of people to keep slaves, and all the anti-integrationists sermons preached from white southern pulpits, and all the anti-woman Christian rhetoric back to St. Irenaeus? Am I really going to have to do that? I&amp;#039;ve been shoveling snow for two days. Give a brother a break. I&amp;#039;ll subcontract the job out to my old friend Diane McWhorter, in whose Carry Me Home, a definitive portrait of the segregated South in which she grew up, we find the local Birmingham Methodists up to no good. &amp;quot;That spring of 1959, (Sid) Smyer&amp;#039;s old ad hoc Methodist organization was revived, in more rabid form, as the Methodist Laymen&amp;#039;s Union. Some 1800 lay Methodists from around Alabama and Florida met in March at Birmingham&amp;#039;s Highlands Methodist Church to resolve that integration was, &amp;#039;a betrayal of unborn generations and a monstrous crime against civilization.&amp;quot; But, as McWhorter points out, Smyer was burning out, so he handed over leadership of this fine Christian undertaking to a more vigorous colleague. &amp;quot;But if Smyer still even believed that such groups were the answer to racial tension, he no longer had the fire to lead them, and the best-known layman at the meeting was Bull Connor.&amp;quot; This is not to say all Christians are Bull Connor -- although, in the case of gay people, far too many of them act like him -- but, rather to point out that, contra Jindal, not all Christians are William Lloyd Garrison, either. Which is why Mr. Madison and the rest of them wanted to keep religion as far from the institutions of political power as possible. In politics, religion is always what the arson boys call, &amp;quot;an accelerant.&amp;quot; We continue. &amp;quot;It is a war - a silent war - against religious liberty...This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith into a land where faith is silenced, privatized and circumscribed.&amp;quot; Find me a single place where &amp;quot;faith&amp;quot; is silenced or circumscribed. (It&amp;#039;s supposed to be &amp;quot;privatized.&amp;quot; Please consult the sixth chapter of Matthew, sixth verse, for details.) Hell, you should pardon the expression, Jindal is making a case that &amp;quot;faith&amp;quot; is silenced in a speech carried by a couple hundred major news organizations. &amp;quot;Faith,&amp;quot; it appears, cannot shut up. Good for it, too. These elites have to this point faced little opposition - a non-profit here, a dedicated attorney there, a small business over there. A handful of principled organizations with the courage to stand up to the crushing weight of a liberal consensus unalterably opposed to their participation in the public square. They are the remnant who have the temerity to believe in America and its promises - and to do something about it. After all, every person wants to live out his or her values. America&amp;#039;s most fundamental promise is that we can.  Oh, get a grip, will you? An entire state is considering legalizing discrimination against gay people on religious grounds. Who is keeping this righteous remnant out of &amp;quot;the public square&amp;quot;? Are their lawsuits not being heard? And live out your values, but try not to do so in such a way as to &amp;quot;circumscribe&amp;quot; the Constitutional rights of others to live theirs. Ah, Hobby Lobby. Jindal couldn&amp;#039;t resist specifics forever. None of this matters to the Obama administration. The argument they have advanced, successfully thus far, is that a faithful business owner cannot operate under the assumption that they can use their moral principles to guide the way their place of business spends money. According to the administration&amp;#039;s legal arguments, the family that owns Hobby Lobby is not protected by the First Amendment&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;free exercise&amp;quot; of religion clause. That&amp;#039;s the part of the First Amendment which states that &amp;quot;Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise&amp;quot; of religion. The Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder argue that because &amp;quot;Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer, and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.&amp;quot; A federal judge agreed: since Hobby Lobby is a &amp;quot;secular&amp;quot; corporation, they have no right to be guided by the religious beliefs of their ownership. Is Jindal arguing that Hobby Lobby is a church? A religious entity? Is he seriously arguing that, in its daily business, Hobby Lobby &amp;quot;exercises religion&amp;quot;? Maybe Hobby Lobby should be a tax-exempt organization. (Jesus, let&amp;#039;s not give him ideas.) Nobody is stopping the owners of Hobby Lobby from exercising their religion. People are arguing that the owners of Hobby Lobby don&amp;#039;t have the right to control the exercise of religion on behalf of their employees who might not share their religious scruples about contraception. Under the Obama regime... Uh-oh, a presidency freely elected twice is a &amp;quot;regime.&amp;quot; Welcome to Limbaughland. I told you he was going full wingnut. ...the president and his allies are intentional in pursuing these conflicts from the perspective that you must sacrifice your most sacred beliefs to government the instant you start a business. You have the protection of the First Amendment as an individual, you see - but the instant you start a business, you lose those protections. No. You still have them. Your business doesn&amp;#039;t because, even under this Supreme Court, businesses don&amp;#039;t have the full protection of the Bill of Rights. This brings us to the Hosanna-Tabor case, which revolved around the ability of a Lutheran academy in Michigan to fire a teacher. Here, the Obama administration advanced another extreme argument, claiming that job regulations prevented the academy from being able to fire anyone over a difference in beliefs. The lawyers for the Obama administration went far beyond the issues of the case to instead advance the legally absurd position that there is no general ministerial exception, arguing that religious groups don&amp;#039;t even have the Constitutionally protected right to select their own ministers or rabbis. Thankfully, here, the administration&amp;#039;s extreme position was rebutted by the Supreme Court in decisive fashion, with a 9-0 decision opposing its perspective. You have to take a pretty extreme position for Elena Kagan to join with Samuel Alito on an opinion. Wow. A 9-0 Supreme Court decision. I&amp;#039;d hate to think what it might have been had not &amp;quot;faith&amp;quot; not been so marginalized and circumscribed and locked out of the public square. 12-0? 92-0? Eleventy-billion to nothing? No less than three lawsuits against the contraception mandate, well-funded lawsuits at that, are thundering through the court system right now. Oppression looks a lot different than it used to look. The administration advanced that extreme argument because it is consistent with the view of many on the left, particularly elite liberal legal scholars, that the god we must worship first is government, and that our rights are doled out by Washington as they see fit. Bullshit. Name one. This same argument is even now being advanced against Catholic hospitals and adoption service providers, and other organizations that have a deeply held worldview, and simply want all their members and employees to share that worldview. The onslaught of lawsuits based on anti-discrimination law will inevitably lead to conflicts, which damage our society. How dare anyone inconvenience my bigotry? Again, two days of snow shovelling forces me to go to McWhorter. &amp;quot;The (Methodist Laymen&amp;#039;s Union) issued a four-page letter to every Methodist congregation in the state, exposing Hughes&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;small group of whites and Negroes who, for several years, have been preaching full racial integration on all levels in all areas of the church.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Stop making trouble. Many states have considered these issues in the light of the ongoing legal battle over marriage laws in the country. But that pressure is not going to stop with photographers and bakers - it&amp;#039;s going to be brought on churches, mosques, and synagogues, too. No state is going to make a church perform gay marriages. This is fear-mongering nonsense, and Jindal knows it. But it will draw him some campaign cash. Illinois shows us a preview of what this looks like. In legislation they proposed altering the definition of marriage, they would have required churches and other congregations to essentially close their doors to outsiders, stop providing services to the community, and close off their facilities to other non-profits or church groups in order to avoid being required to host same sex ceremonies. That word there, &amp;quot;essentially,&amp;quot; is being forced to carry far too much of a load of mendacity for its poor syllables to uphold. Nobody is proposing a law that would require a church to perform same-sex ceremonies, not even essentially. Catholic churches in Illinois have abandoned some of their social services rather than conform to anti-discrimination statutes, and shame on their molestation-enabling souls, but nobody is making them conduct gay marriages. But, again, it&amp;#039;ll make a helluva mailer to the folks in Iowa. This war on religious liberty - on your freedom to exercise your religion, on your freedom to associate, on your freedom of expression - is only going to continue. It is going to continue because of an idea, a wrongheaded concept, which President Obama apparently believes: that religious freedom means you have the freedom to worship, and that&amp;#039;s all. In this misbegotten and un-American conception of religious liberty, your rights begin and end in the pew. For those of us who believe in the Great Commission, we know how silly this idea is. The President suggests that the right to worship and the right to evangelize and freely practice our faith are the same thing. They&amp;#039;re not, and they&amp;#039;re not what the First Amendment clearly protects: the freedom to practice our faith and protect our conscience, even if those activities don&amp;#039;t happen to occur inside the four walls of a church building. We have the right to practice our faith and protect our conscience no matter where we happen to be. Again, &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; is saying all this in a well-publicized speech -- for which, I presume, he got himself a nice check -- and it was a speech in which he was attempting to launch himself as a plausible candidate for president of the United States despite his obvious incompetence as a political executive. And the speech was about how oppressed and marginalized he feels. I try not to mock religion. But I have every intention of hanging up religious victimhood like the stuff &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; is peddling and laugh my head off at it until it retreats in shame back under the rock where it belongs. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a27331/bobby-jindal-religious-liberty-speech-021414/>