“Militant secularists” again

Barr says the militant atheists are gonna eat your religious freedom.

Attorney General William Barr warned New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan of “an organized, militant secular effort” to suppress religion in “the marketplace of ideas” in an interview Wednesday.

“The problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on non-religious people,” Barr told Dolan on his SiriusXM radio show Conversation with Cardinal Dolan. “It’s the opposite — it’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people, and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.”

“Freedom” is another one of those words that get deployed as silencers when in fact it matters what kind of freedom you’re talking about. “Religious freedom” can mean “freedom” to keep children out of school, to keep women out of universities, to beat children with sticks, to preach racism – it can mean a lot of bad things, many of them illegal. If William Barr is arguing for that kind of religious freedom he should stop talking.

Citing Democrats’ efforts to coerce religious employers to violate their conscience rights as well as their ongoing effort to expand abortion access, Barr has used his platform as attorney general to speak out about what he sees as encroachments on religious liberty.

Sure enough; this is what I’m saying. We don’t think people have a “religious right” to, for instance, refuse to provide an offered good or service to lesbians or gays on the grounds that god hates fags. We don’t think “conscience” means shunning or persecuting people because you don’t like their romantic and sexual choices.

He drew a torrent of criticism in October over a speech at Notre Dame Law School in which he said religiously convicted Americans face “social, educational, and professional ostracism.”

Diddums.

“We believe in the separation of church and state,” Barr stated [yesterday]. “But what permits a limited government and minimal command and control of the population — and allows people to have freedom of choice in their lives — and trust in the people is the fact that they are a people that are capable of disciplining themselves according to moral values.”

But moral values are not religious values. Many religious values are highly immoral, as I’ve been hinting.

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