Political correctness vs. the church.

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: Religion

FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE, the freedom to believe as one would without interference from the state, is the hallmark of the First Amendment's free exercise of religion clause. In today's society, however, the forces of political correctness are redefining religious precepts as acts of discrimination or hate speech. The threat to liberty affects us all, regardless of our beliefs. As the Founding Fathers well knew, once the forces of censorship are unleashed by government for politically desired ends, there is a simultaneous death of liberty and birth of tyranny. Tolerance is the watchword for all and must be a constant if liberty is to survive.

If individual liberty is to be defensible for one, it must be equally defended for all. Thomas Jefferson expressed the American constitutional conception of liberty perhaps better than any other when he wrote to Benjamin Rush on April 21,1803: "Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will, but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."

As Jefferson understood (and foresaw for the U.S.), law frequently has been bent to achieve acts that offend liberty in service either to a majority or to a political minority that has acquired the power to govern. The role of constitutional law is to correct the abuse, for courts to strike the offense by invalidating the law.

Today, across the country, laws defining hate speech and discrimination liberally have been construed such that churches and synagogues that adhere to the view that homosexuality is an abomination, consistent with Leviticus 18:22-23, have been deemed engaged in acts of discrimination or hate speech--and ministers have been subject to prosecution. Through this means, for the first time, governments have imposed censorship on places of worship and have interfered with the free exercise of religion.

Judeo-Christian beliefs define as sinful a wide range of activities that occur without criminal sanction in modem society, including fornication, homosexuality, dishonesty, gluttony, adultery, abortion, lack of chastity, and disobedience to parents, just to name a few. So long as those beliefs fall within the Jeffersonian definition of liberty, bounded by the equal...