Submitted to a Candid World

Can it be really?  As the world stands poised to watch China pretend to be a peaceful-freedom loving “citizen of the world” during the Olympics, Judge Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court jurist and conservative commentator who lost his seat for defying court orders to pull down his Ten Commandments display, seems likely to make an important and, indeed, liberal point: namely, that China has a long way to go -

Even positive signs toward more openness contain dark undercurrents of continued religious intolerance. During China’s so-called “Cultural Revolution” between 1966 and 1976, its Communist Party banned the Bible and confiscated all copies of it. So, the Chinese government’s announcement that it is permitting the printing and distribution at the Games of Olympic Edition Bibles that advertise state-sanctioned churches constitutes genuine progress. Yet, Olympics organizers have advised those traveling to the games not to bring more than one Bible with them and that “bringing in Bibles for distribution or propaganda” is strictly prohibited.

An important message, albeit the focus on persecution of Christianity is a little self-serving. China fundamentally has yet to understand “freedom,” and continues to fail to embrace the importance of democracy in powering the people of a successful nation onto the world stage.  While all eyes turn to China for the Olympics, it’s an important time to be making this point.  Media attention ought to become media pressure for change.

As I read the rest of the column, I hold my breath: could it be that WorldNetDaily has become a force for good?

Aaaaand release.  No, it could not be.  Rather than continuing to argue for expanded human rights, Moore turns the rest of his piece into a lament of the “persecution” of Christians in America:

However, such a God-given blessing can disappear at a moment’s notice if we are not vigilant to maintain it. Federal courts have issued an alarming number of decisions evincing a hostility toward Christianity over the last 30 years on everything from prayer in schools to the public display of the Ten Commandments and even restricting prisoner rehabilitation programs that use Christian principles. Several anti-Christian books by proud self-proclaimed atheists have hit the New York Times best-seller lists…

To equate the course of religious discussion in America with anything that could even resemble religious persecution in China – or imply that the former could become the latter – is the height of vanity, and trivializes the true suffering of an embattled people.  It’s like calling Messianic Judaism a new Holocaust: the inflammatory equivalence of debate and religious disagreement with violent persecution.

Moore should be ashamed of himself for appropriating the suffering of others to his own cause.  That the law denies American Christians the right to use the machinery of the state to proselytize is not censorship, and it’s not discrimination: it’s our Constitution, the very document that guards against real discrimination.  I grow increasingly weary of those who frame political defeat as legal oppression.  Perhaps Moore needs a monument to the Constitution on the steps of his (former) courthouse: maybe then he’d better understand the proper relationship between religion and democracy, rather than playing the martyr.

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