Dear Editor:I vowed I would never write anything again, but I am so frustrated about what really ails America and its future that I hope to find some relief in doing so.
Let’s start with the formation of this nation over 200 years ago. Is there anyone, with any form of knowledge of history, able to believe that the Representatives of the 1st U.S. Congress, who voted to open Congressional sessions with prayer, would have amended our Constitution with an Amendment that forbade any mention of religion in the public square? With any objective understanding, the answer is ‘no’. The words ‘Separation of Church and State’ does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, although many believe they do.
Going back to the year 1954, Senator Lyndon Johnson, through political maneuvering (I use that reference kindly), had the Johnson Amendment implemented in order to get elected. (Editor’s note: The Johnson Amendment refers to a change in the U.S. tax code made in 1954 which prohibited tax-exempt organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Amendment.)
The phrase Separation of Church and State was picked up by secularist thinking at the time, and went national, further than even Johnson expected. He intended it to be a local Bill in Texas to stop anti-Johnson preaching from the pulpit. Even JFK’s Democratic handlers (with a different thinking for the country than today) used the slogan, ‘There will be a separation of church and state’ to get him elected. As Kennedy, a Catholic repeated, ‘I will not take orders from the Vatican.’
However, as we now know, the Bill did pass (although not absolute) and it did indeed silence our clergy (the thinking of which our Independence was written on) from speaking out to their followers, due to the threat of losing their tax exempt status. The silence of the pulpit in America is a scary one, as I recall the quote from Charles Finney, ‘If politics become so corrupt that the foundation of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it.’
Where did we go from there? Now 200 years later, with the silence of the pulpit, our nation moved forward with Roe verses Wade in the 1960s. That produced the abortion of 55,000,700 babies and counting, over the last 40 years. Regardless of when an individual believes life starts, we must agree that some of those infants were born alive and murdered as our laws describe murder. That’s not an opinion; it is fact. That’s only a small part of what ails America’s thinking today, although an important one when one thinks morally with compassion.
Most blame this administration for what is going on today, but they are only partly to blame. They weren’t in power in the 1950s when the ‘The Johnson Amendment’ was implemented, although their leaders are using it skillfully. But apart from that, this administration’s leadership is responsible for making new laws that are forcing our citizen’s to rely on government to live. Couldn’t we agree that it translates to ‘bondage’?
History tells us that thousands of years ago the Israelites were held in bondage by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt and forced to rely on the rulers of that period to survive. Is history being repeated today describing our citizens as being held in bondage by our government with similar circumstances? What happens next? No Democracy in history survived when they reached the point that we are approaching, ‘the point of no return’, because of the majority of the electorate thinking the government must provide for their need.
We could go on and on with this, but to what avail? The facts seem to be that no one wants to listen or understand even when our three branches of government are being swept aside and the government tends toward a monarchy, something this nation sacrificed to shed since the inception of our Constitution.
Who do we blame for where we stand today? Is it the citizens themselves? Should this nation be afraid of what the future will bring to our children and nation? We should think hard on this.
Certainly the thinking and object that our forefathers laid out in our Constitution was to have its citizens follow a loving God ‘of their own choice’, if they wished, to practice integrity, morals and to teach the workers ‘to help themselves’ and have the opportunity to build this great nation.
Is it correct to say history tells us that it was successful, or at least up to the end of the era of the greatest generation? That could be open for debate. Where did the so-called the greatest generation go wrong? They left a nation that should have had the wisdom of mistakes of the past, thankful of our nation’s sacrifices upholding our Constitution of common sense and good judgment, to ‘a majority of a depraved and uninformed electorate’ willing to elect a man and his party to our government willing to lose the respect of the world, deny God and the laws of this nation and apply new and extreme laws and restrictions that are destroying our economy.
Will our democracy fall as others have in the past? ‘It’s in the hands of our electorate’, that seems to have failed not once but twice. Will we be given a third and final chance for an independent and God- fearing nation?
It is imperative that we remember the 2012 Democratic National Convention lest we forget when the majority of the members voted publicly to remove any mention of God from their platform. The vote was rescinded at the time by a shrewder and wiser leadership who saw the disunity it would bring from its older and original Democrats that would never stand for the removal of the God this country had prayed to during every war since the American Revolution. When the leadership announced that they would leave the mention of God in the platform regardless of the majority of the negative votes, the noise of boos, raised arms and jeers were very evident of what the majority of the members who were present at that convention desired. This is all factual and a matter of record for anyone wanting to be informed on the matter, something the media played down for obvious reasons.
May God bless all the citizens of this nation regardless of their leaning and help us to return the thinking of the majority of this nation’s electorate to integrity, morals and ‘unity’ as it was in our constructive past.
JJ Schaub, Virginville