Follow-up

As a follow-up to my ACLU post on the First Amendment, I would like to post Neil Cavuto's "Common Sense" segment from his show yesterday (11/16/05). I have always enjoyed this segment of his show and it was striking to hear his view on our fear to show our Christmas spirit and express our First Amendment rights.

Freedom From Religion?

This whole "Merry Christmas" debate isn't about Christmas. And it isn't about being merry.

It is about our past and how we're forgetting it.

It's about religion and how we're burying it.

And it's about life and how we're trivializing it.

We're eager to talk up "gifts," afraid to talk about "giving."

We live in a society so afraid of offending others that we only end up offending ourselves. Whether it's trying to take "God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance or our "trust" in a higher being out of our currency.

A tiny sliver of Americans are free not to like religion, but they cannot dictate life for the overwhelming majority who do. Yet they have and they do.

They make us afraid to say "God," even more afraid to say "Christmas."

They treat prayer as if it's a dirty word. But will defend to the death their right to utter all dirty words.

And so it goes.

The tiny minority of priests who are bad is front-page news. The overwhelming majority who are not are nowhere in the news.

We seek out hypocrisy in the religious and find it. We see it more everyday in our secular press and ignore it.

No, God is not dead. We just live in a society that increasingly wants us to think, he never existed in the first place.

Some say it's about "not" ramming religion down our throats. Pity, it's left us instead with emptiness and indifference in our lives.

All I know is a society afraid to even talk of prayer, is a society that doesn't have a prayer.

He really makes us think about what will happen if we don't stand up against "political correctness" and those that would take our free expression of religion away from us, we really "don't have a prayer."

Neil Cavuto "Common Sense"