Six chaplains in Virginia have resigned, dozens more have signed a protest letter and there’s talk of having a rally outside the governor’s pad on November 1, just a few days before the election. All allege that they’re the victims of religious persecution.
In this case it’s persecution because the state enacted a policy forbidding sectarian prayers at publicly sponsored events and is thus “expunging our Judeo-Christian heritage from the public square” because “in the name of tolerance, public faith is frowned upon”.
Of course, that’s a lie. Not being able to force your religious views on others especially at a public event is not persecution. It’s a realistic expectation of neutrality and plain old good manners.
It’s also a lie that that prayer cannot be stripped of its sectarian nature, but that’s another subject. Today’s subject is the state getting exactly what it asked for which is grief from the religious set.
The real answer is not to strip prayer of “God”, “Jesus”, “Allah” and the like, but to stop inserting prayers of any sort into public events.
No one can complain about not being able to say “In Jesus name we pray, amen” if no one is up in front of the attendees praying to begin with. Yes, the religious set will cry about it, but so what? It seems to me that every time we give them an inch, they insist that anything less than a mile is “persecution”.
For example, they’ve gotten their inch here in Texas by managing to get the Bible into the schools as an elective course. Now certain supporters are attempting to get an extremely biased curriculum that got one school here in Texas sued and is peddled by right wing Protestant Christians such as Chuck Norris as the course material.
An inch is never enough for the religious right and the sooner we learn this the better off we’ll be.
