Where Did Contemporary Incivility Have Its Roots? 

Where Did Contemporary Incivility Have Its Roots?

The Hate-Religion Party
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 27, 2003


PONTEFICATIONS

THE MOST IMPORTANT RELIGIOUS HOLIDAY celebrated in our public schools happens this Friday. It is neither Christmas nor Passover, both effectively banished from government institutions in the name of the ???Separation of Church and State.???


But this one religious holiday of Europe???s pagan witchcraft religions, Halloween, is honored with extensive ritual artwork, free sweets and widespread approval in our socialist schools. This religious holiday seems mysteriously exempt from criticism or attack by the American Civil Liberties Union.



America, according to the ACLU, is a ???secular country??? in which the government equally protects the rights of all religions but does not use its power or expenditures to promote any one of them. This, of course, is not what is happening.



The Culture War is also a religious war, and leftists are using government to promote and advance their own cults ??? from the pseudo-science called Marxism to a host of pagan and anti-Judeo-Christian movements ??? to alter America???s culture.



The two dominant political parties, Republican and Democrat, each attract a wide variety of supporters. But they too, researchers have found, tend to divide not only ideologically but also along religious lines. This has gone far beyond past tendencies for Roman Catholics and Jews to vote Democratic, two old patterns now reversing as members of both groups vote increasingly Republican with each election.



Among rank and file voters, a Harris Poll reported last February 26, nine percent fewer Democrats than Republicans believe in heaven, 17 percent fewer in the existence of the devil and 19 percent fewer in Hell.



But when it came to New Age beliefs apart from the Jewish and Christian faiths, 12 percent more Democrats believe in ghosts, 13 percent more in reincarnation and 21 percent more in astrology.



Self-identified independents in this poll tended to share the less Judeo-Christian, more pagan beliefs of Democrats except about astrology, on which independents??? views were midway between superstitious Democrats and more skeptical Republicans.



The Harris Poll also sifted this data into three racial-ethnic categories and reported that blacks held the strongest belief in Hell and the devil, while Hispanics had the strongest belief in ghosts and reincarnation.



But among the ruling elite that controls the Democratic Party, the rejection of God and indeed all religious belief is dramatic. At the 1992 Democratic National Convention that nominated Bill Clinton its candidate for President, ???60 percent of first-time white delegates???either claimed no attachment to religion or displayed the minimal attachment by attending worship services ???a few times a year??? or less.??? Thus write Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, Political Science professors at Baruch College, City University of New York.



These secular values are reflected in leftist Democratic positions on a host of issues, they observe, from abortion to education to sexual mores. And they are reflected in both fear of and active hostility towards evangelical Christians, one of whom is President George W. Bush.



???If the GOP can be labeled the party of religious conservatives,??? wrote Professors Bolce and De Maio in the journal The Public Interest, ???the Democrats, with equal validity, can be called the secularist party.???



But when these scholars compared coverage of such issues in the New York Times and Washington Post, they were struck by the almost complete absence, the ???paucity of news stories and commentaries that identify secularists or the secularist outlook with the Democratic party, particularly when contrasted to the large number of stories and editorials in both papers about the Republican party???s relationship with evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (43 and 682 stories respectively).???



In this area as in others, those controlling the news media share the ruling Democratic mindset. Robert Lichter and his associates in their study The Media Elite identified one of the prime characteristics of this elite as ???its secular outlook.???



This can be evident even when not declared, note Bolce and De Maio. ???People for the American Way, for example,??? they write, ???is most often characterized in press accounts as a civil liberties and civil rights group, rarely as a secularist organization. But a visit to the organization???s website shows that its culture agenda is the mirror opposite of the Christian Coalition???s.???



In his fine book Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity, David Limbaugh lays out a lawyerly case showing that the Left is systematically trying to purge Christianity and religious Judaism from public schools and everyplace else in the public square.



The leftist aim is not to leave those schools and young minds devoid of faith. It is to erase all beliefs that contradict the secular humanist values of the Left, a rival religion. Humanism, as the ultimate standard of our language defines it, can be called ???the religion of man,??? a faith in which ???man is the measure of all things,??? in which humankind becomes God.



More than a century ago, when the new white-robed priesthood of science began challenging the literal statements of the Bible, those who lost their old faiths were easily seduced by new ones. Foremost of these pseudo-scientific cults was Marxism, which claimed to be scientific in its methods, to have deep understanding of invisible forces controlling history, and to be able to usher in a heaven on earth and the emergence of the ???crystal man??? evolved beyond greed, war and individuality.



The religious wars, tortures and concentration camps unleashed by socialism and this cult of Marxism ??? now discredited by its failed predictions and disastrous tests in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere ??? have thus far murdered more than 100,000,000 human beings, arguably causing more bloodshed and horror in a shorter time than all the other religions of world history combined.



But even as the Soviet Union was unraveling, secular leftists were emerging ???as a political force within a major party at the 1972 Democratic National Convention??? that would nominate Senator George McGovern, write Bolce and De Maio. About a third of its white delegates were secularists, while only about five percent of America???s population could be so described.



(Only five percent of first-time white Republican convention delegates in 1972, as in 2000, fit the working definition as ???secularists,??? but another 67 percent of GOP delegates were religious and attended services at least once each month.)



In the 2000 national election, write Bolce and De Maio, about 16 percent of America???s electorate was defined as ???secularist,??? roughly the same percentage as union members. Two-thirds of these secularists cast their votes for Democratic candidate Al Gore.



Akin to these secular voters, note Bolce and De Maio, are those identified by the American National Election Study (ANES) of the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan as ???anti-fundamentalist.???



This group, ANES found, is generally made up of ???secularists, the highly educated, particularly those living in big cities, and persons who strongly favor legalized abortion and gay rights, oppose prayer in schools, and who, ironically, ???strongly agree??? that one should be tolerant of persons whose moral standards are different from one???s own.???



???Over a quarter of Clinton???s white supporters in 1992 said that they intensely disliked Christian fundamentalists,??? write Bolce and De Maio. ???In both 1996 and 2000, about a third of the total white Democratic presidential vote came from persons with these sentiments.???



???Just as the Republican Party has labored under the charge of being ???hijacked??? by fundamentalists,??? write Bolce and De Maio, ???so too could the Democrats in equal fairness be tagged as the party sympathetic to irreligionists, a group that historically has been viewed more negatively than moralistic evangelicals.??? Indeed, a March 2002, Pew Research Center for the People national poll found that more than half of respondents expressed unfavorable feelings towards ???nonbelievers,??? almost double the number unfavorably inclined towards the ???Christian conservative movement.???



And this may explain why Left-of-center newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post are quick to identify the GOP with the Religious Right ??? but slow to label their ideological soulless-mates the Democrats with the Pagan, Humanist or Godless Left.



???To portray secularists as ideologically distinct and as aggressive political actors,??? write Bolce and De Maio, ???would be to shift the landscape dramatically. It might serve to legitimize the political involvement of religious traditionalists, and it might also have negative consequences for journalists??? favored groups and causes.???



And make no mistake, Democratic leftists are aggressive. As First Lady, Hillary Clinton tried to force a new regulation on the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that would have made it a crime for any employer to engage in ???religious harassment.??? What is such harassment? Perhaps something as simple as a manager wearing a yarmulke or a cross, or having a Bible on her desk, or inviting an office friend to attend a Bible study session.



Hillary Clinton purportedly also urged the U.S. Postal Service to end the traditional Madonna and Child stamp issued each Christmastime. And Hillary, according to one FBI agent who worked in the Clinton White House, decorated her own upstairs Christmas tree with sex and drug paraphernalia such as hypodermic needles, sex toys and condoms in a way presumably intended to mock Christianity. Such are the people now in control of the Democratic Party.



That party???s founder Thomas Jefferson did write in a private letter that he favored separation of church and state. But Jefferson also wanted the state to remain very, very small and to keep it confined to a distant corner of the public square. When Leftists such as Senator Clinton (D.-N.Y.) use his phrase today, they do so as socialists who want the government occupying every inch of the public square and every aspect of citizen lives. If the church and synagogue must be separate from this Leviathan, then they will be driven out of the public square entirely.



Bill Clinton, who won the presidency with a sizeable secular vote, was quick to order the Internal Revenue Service to withdraw its tax exemption from a small church in Valhalla, New York, that had dared to criticize his morals publicly as a threat to other believers. (But Clinton and other Democrats continued to give campaign speeches and even take up political collections in African-American churches.) President Clinton also ordered the military to introduce pagan Wiccan chaplains into our armed forces.



Such are the tricks and treats that Americans should take note of this Halloween as their children in public schools are encouraged to celebrate a pagan religious holiday in taxpayer-supported buildings where Judaism and Christianity have been banished.



In some of these schools Muslim children are allowed openly to pray five times daily while Jewish and Christian children are forbidden. Science classes violate separation of church and state by teaching, in effect, that a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is wrong.



Some public schoolchildren are taught to think of Mother Earth (the Greek pagan goddess Gaia) as one living Being, and that individuality, capitalism and private property inherently violate this ecological oneness. Moral values are taught to students, coerced to attend such classes, which violate their parents??? deepest religious values and beliefs. And the Canadian Government is about to rule in this clash of cultures that the Bible is ???hate literature??? because of who and what this Politically Incorrect and hence-no-longer-Good Book condemns.

Who do you think appointed the leftist judges to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who ordered the removal of the words ???under God??? from the Pledge of Allegiance in these schools, a case now being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court? Do they believe that leftist politics is ???above God,??? that God is dead? How much longer can we be ???One Nation Under God??? with one of our two major political parties??? leaders moving away from God?

Could it be that we now have three major political parties in the United States ??? the Republican Party, the waning Democratic Party and its evil usurper the Demoncratic Party, whose adherents literally want America to jettison its traditional allegiance to a Judeo-Christian Deity, being ruled de facto by the minions of hell, demons? If you prefer, call it the Halloween Party. But can this be true when secularists and pagans tell pollsters that they do not even believe in hell or in the devil?

What these secularists apparently do believe in is acquiring political power, by trick or treat, over you and your children. What would happen to America if and when they do?

Most individual Democrats are still religious, moral, God-fearing people. When are they going to demand that these secular elites who have taken over this political party give it back ??? and then go to Hell?

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--Winston
national7000@yahoo.com

We are warned to be either hot or cold and not tepid!