"dangerous for our children to even know": Rep. Monique Davis

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2008/04/
Originally posted: April 3, 2008

Rep. Monique Davis to atheist Rob Sherman: `It’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!'

The following exchange between atheist activist Rob Sherman of Buffalo Grove and Ill. Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) took place Wednesday afternoon in the General Assembly as Sherman testified before the House State Government Administration Committee. I know from experience that many of you will side with Davis (update -- apparently I was wrong! ), but I ask you to consider what the outcry would have been if a lawmaker had launched a similar attack on the beliefs of a religious person. Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy -- it’s tragic -- when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.

Like religion is about shutting people up? Pharaoh to Moses: "Shut up. We are god here." I think Pharaoh's claims turned out to be over reaching just a little bit.

Ms. Davis's outbursts are at once blasphemous and anti-American:

Firstly, the idea that any member of any legislature at any level of government in the USA should damn and vilify in any god's name any constituent while giving testimony to the assembly before the law is about as blasphemous a use of religion as any imaginable: see, for example, the Gospels' assessment of Sanhedrin members who misuse their spiritual and political authority.

Secondly her personal attack is un-American, and essentially intentionally treasonable. Under our law (constitutional, statutory and common), individual personal ideologies are before the law irrelevant: if human decency and fundamental human rights are deniable than according to our Declaration of Independence, the legal basis of lawful government is absent, and moot. Our legal system protects private belief and forbids the use of private belief as a legal tool against anyone before the law. Our American legal system all the way back to William Penn and even New Amsterdam has fundamentally disallowed this kind of abuse of religion as a fundamental cornerstone of the rule of law.

Ms. Davis and her speech deny both divine and human law and justice. Even if she escapes human justice, in the final judgment she will face the judgment of that same god she defames.

God preserve us from these enemies "who kill the prophets and then build monuments over the prophets' bones." "One nation under god" does not mean one party fascist rule. It means total tolerance of and acceptance of and celebration of difference and diversity and it means our great nation's profit from its multiplicity and overabundance of sacred heritage including atheisms, theisms, and its free market of ideologies. That is our nation's greatest common wealth.