Doug Bandow, a great guy I worked for as an intern over twenty-two years one summer, has a serious bit of journalism on the secular intolerance of traditional religious belief, esp. Christian, in Albion.
As someone who just broke his Day of Atonement fast with a turkey meal at the Village Kitchen--yum, yum--this is disconcerting. (Twenty-five hours without food or drink is tough.)
Bandow's point is, I think, irrefutable. Without a First Amendment protecting religious expression, the secular bigots take over. What he fails to do, however, is to link liberals' hatred of traditional religious belief--usu. Christian--that condemns homosexual practices. As Lawrence Auster has written, it all comes down to homosexuality.
Bandow, who worked in the Reagan White House and has a law degree from Stanford, is too nice & sensitive to make that connection--lots of gays at Cato, including its vice president--although his examples show it to be true. And Bandow's examples are truly chilling.
As someone who just broke his Day of Atonement fast with a turkey meal at the Village Kitchen--yum, yum--this is disconcerting. (Twenty-five hours without food or drink is tough.)
Bandow's point is, I think, irrefutable. Without a First Amendment protecting religious expression, the secular bigots take over. What he fails to do, however, is to link liberals' hatred of traditional religious belief--usu. Christian--that condemns homosexual practices. As Lawrence Auster has written, it all comes down to homosexuality.
Bandow, who worked in the Reagan White House and has a law degree from Stanford, is too nice & sensitive to make that connection--lots of gays at Cato, including its vice president--although his examples show it to be true. And Bandow's examples are truly chilling.
He writes:
Far more serious are direct government attacks on basic expressions of faith. For instance, the committee pointed to the case of a long-time employee of a public housing agency who was demoted and threatened for questioning same-sex marriage on his personal Facebook page. A street preacher was arrested and charged with a hate crime for saying that homosexuality was a sin. A businessman was detained and questioned by the police for displaying Bible verses viewed as "homophobic."As a side note, I'm currently holding in my hands Bandow's 1990 book, a collection of his op-eds, is a tour de force of libertarian perspective, packed with forceful reasoning and vivid examples. I'll always cherish The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington.
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