Ten Florida Billboards Renounce Separation of Church and State.
A Hillsborough public policy group whose Christian platform included a push for a state ban on gay marriage has embraced a new attack on an old target: the separation of church and state.
Ten billboard advertisements against what activist Terry Kemple called the separation "lie" are being put up across Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. Seven or eight of the billboard messages already are in place, and the rest will be by the end of this week, Kemple said.
For the next six months, they'll be seen a million times a day, said retired businessman Gregg Smith, who rented the ad space for $50,000.
The message, as explained onwww.noseparation.org, is that "America's government was made only for people who are moral and religious."
"The Judeo-Christian foundation that the Founding Fathers established when America began is the reason that this country has prospered for 200-plus years," said Kemple, president and sole employee of the local Community Issues Council, which paid for the Web site.
"The fact is, for the last 40 years, as anti-God activists have incrementally removed the recognition of God's place in the establishment of our country, we have gone downhill."
Smith, 73, who spends half of the year at his Tampa home, brought the idea to Kemple's attention as a "separate ministry" needing local support. For now, the initiative is just educational, though both men left open the opportunity for future work.
Labels: discrimination, separation of church and state, theocracy
posted by Ann Neumann at
6:41 AM
2 Comments:
I also oppose the seperation of church and state. Because it's not in the Constitution. Anywhere.
That doesn't mean I want to force others to belong to my religion. In fact, I don't understand how anyone could draw that conclusion from my statement, yet "liberals" always do. (I put "liberals" in scare quotes because they are not particularly liberal about anything except recreational sex and recreational drugs.)
The greatest threat to religious freedom today is this so-called "seperation" that has not--in my lifetime, anyway--ever been invoked to defend people of faith from the government. It has always been used in the opposite fashion--as a weapon against people of faith, wielded by the state.
BEN
Hi Ben. Thanks for your comment. I'll start by saying that liberals are no more agreed on their political and social issues than are conservatives so you can drop the hating for a minute.
The fact is that "separation of church and state" was written as a description of the Establishment clause by the man who wrote the Establishment clause. The phrase may not be there but that's what he said it means so I'll take his word.
And it is damn well important. You can claim all you want that the principle of the clause is only used to limit rights of those of faith. And yet, it protects individual rights. But when people of faith interpret those rights as license to influence others in society of how to believe, or worse, to shape the laws in the country that govern a pluralistic society, we've got a problem.
I recommend you read more about the Anabaptists who came to the US after centuries of being killed in Europe and were granted religious freedom here. They truly understand that religious tolerance prevents one idea or stripe of faith from usurping undue influence in our country. True religious freedom depends on it.
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