There are days it feels like we are living in the Twilight Zone, not the United States of America. News headlines recently read that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed an executive order prohibiting any official state travel to Indiana, while planning an official state-sponsored visit to Cuba. In what world does a US governor ban travel to another US state for standing-up for religious liberty, while planning a goodwill trip to meet with communist dictators? The American people need to wake-up to the reality that our Constitutional rights are under an all-out assault by the secular left in this country. If we do not act soon, and support common sense laws like the one just signed by Indiana Governor Mike Pence protecting religious liberty, the Bill of Rights will not be worth the paper on which it is printed.
The outrage last week directed at Indiana Governor Mike Pence and his state was related to the fact that he and the GOP state legislature passed a Religious Liberty Restoration Act bill that mirrors similar laws in 19 other states and the federal government. LGBT activists have misrepresented this bill to a level that borders on the criminal; they claimed that it was the resurrection of Jim Crow laws redirected toward gay and lesbian individuals. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that the aggressive far-left in this country has used the LGBT agenda as a weapon in an attempt to silence people of faith from disapproving of same-sex marriage and other sexual license. In short, the left now holds the “right” to sexual autonomy above the Constitutional right to religious freedom.
Make no mistake about it: this national debate about religious liberty has less to do with the LGBT lifestyle, and much more to do with state censorship of religious practice. Americans of all political backgrounds ought to be deeply concerned that the courts, outside of the legislative process, have tried to equate sexual practice with a protected class. Sexual preference is not on par with race, gender, or age, all of which are characteristics that are immutable and involuntary. For courts to fine and punish people and their businesses for not wanting to participate in same-sex ceremonies is well outside the mainstream American idea of anti-discrimination practice. In fact, the only discrimination-taking place in these instances is legal bigotry directed at people of faith.
The First Amendment is the very first right guaranteed under our Constitution. If the politically correct police can successfully subvert religious liberty to the “right” of sexual autonomy, then the Constitution is imperiled. If the First Amendment falls, then the entire Bill of Rights will be right behind it, and this nation “of the people, by the people, for the people” shall perish from the Earth. I applaud the steps taken by Indiana and 19 other states to protect the precious right to religious liberty that every American, regardless of their race, national origin, or gender, is guaranteed under our Constitution. The people must stand-up and defend such common sense laws against the whims of the cultural elites, or the American experiment is self-government will be ceded to the rule of the courts and the liberal elites in New York and Washington.
