Those Who Control the Past Control the Future

I’m honored to be one of the speakers tomorrow at the second Greenville Area Stand Up for Religious Liberty Rally against the Obamacare DHHS mandates. These sorts of citizen demonstrations against governmental overreach are critical if we’re going to recover the country and restore the republic. Such events are essential because they often expose misconceptions that cloud the truth about American liberty and America’s founding. One of the most precious freedoms protected by our Constitution is that of religious liberty; therefore, the Obama Administration’s contraception mandates that force even Catholic charities to pay for condoms and birth control pills aren’t only unconstitutional, they’re fundamentally un-American.

I’m a reasonable man, and I don’t for one minute support national laws that would make non-abortion inducing contraception contraband. This accusation, however, is the tactic the Administration has taken to try and paint Americans concerned about the Department of Health and Human Services’ trampling of religious liberty as fanatics. We watched as billboards were painted that read Republicans were working to ensure that “contraception will soon be contraband.” We listened as the President painted a picture of secretive conservative conspiracies that would threaten women’s health and lead to the banning of traditional birth control medications. None of this was ever the case, but it made for a great distraction.

Such distraction is regular fare for those interested in curtailing freedom. While no clear-minded conservative would seek to ban non-abortion inducing birth control, we’d also never consider forcing religiously objecting organizations to provide pills and services to which they object. But that’s exactly what the Administration and its allies sought to do, claiming separation of church and state as their justification. Never mind the fact that the phrase “separation of church and state” isn’t even in the Constitution, the First Amendment, that actually addresses religious liberty, was designed to protect people of faith from the government, not the government from people of faith. The language of the First Amendment could not be clearer, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” I’d say that Administration mandates on contraception violate this principle, particularly with regard to the Catholic Church.

What the Administration is attempting to do is to create a ruse wherein they can expand abortion-on-demand in America. Poll after poll indicates that, across racial, age and gender categories, Americans are increasingly pro-life. Therefore, the Administration needed to create a smokescreen for their funding of abortion drugs. Hiding behind a birth control pill is just their way of hiding what they’re really trying to accomplish: funding abortion medications in the name of protecting condoms. Separation of church and state is not an argument that holds historical water when it comes to such contraception mandates, and those who understand our nation’s history know better.

The Founders would’ve been appalled at the prospect of a president pushing mandates that violate the free exercise of religious faith in America. They would be mortified that members of Congress would claim “separation of church and state” to shut down the fundamentally American right to exercise religious freedom. In fact, Gouverneur Morris, the penman of the Constitutional Convention, instructed the French to include God in the writing of their Constitution. Morris, the man who, literally, wrote down the Constitution of the United States in Congress, advised the French Revolutionaries to base their Revolution on God and the belief that the rights of man come from Him. How many times have you heard that in a textbook? Not many.

The sad truth in human history is that he who controls the past controls the future. This Administration and its allies have attempted to rewrite the history of religious freedom in America to achieve their own ends. The end result, they hoped, was that Americans wouldn’t know enough about their own history to hold them back. Let’s stand up for religious liberty in America, while we simultaneously stand up for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for preborn babies, to prove the President wrong. We can and will restore this country, but we must learn the lessons of the past to win the future.