I blogged last week about Dennis Prager’s original peice in Townhall.com entitled, “America, Not Keith Ellison, Decides What Book a Congressman Takes His Oath on.”
Well he recieved a lot of harsh criticism and was attacked visciously as he describes especially by the left-blogosphere who just can’t seem to engage in any type of civilized discourse and offers this rebuttal to the major accusations of his critics:
To those who claim Prager is advocating something unconstitutional by demanding that the Bible be included in oaths of office and that Mr. Ellison has a right to practice the religion of his choice and that there shall be no religious test for candidates for office in America Prager has this to say:
I never even hinted that there should be a religious test. It has never occurred to me that only Christians run for office in America. The idea is particularly laughable in my case since I am not now, nor ever have been, a Christian. I am a Jew (a non-denominational religious Jew, for the record), and I would vote for any Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Mormon, atheist, Jew, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Wiccan, Confucian, Taoist or combination thereof whose social values I share. Conversely, I would not vote for a fellow Jew whose social values I did not share. I want people of every faith and of no faith who affirm the values I affirm to enter political life…I agree with the tens of thousands of office holders in American history who have honored the American tradition — I am well aware it is not a law, and I do not want it to be — of bringing a Bible to their ceremonial or actual swearing-in. Keith Ellison is ending that powerful tradition, and it is he who has called the public’s attention to his doing so. He obviously thinks this is important. I think it is important. My critics think it isn’t.
Why wouldn’t Ellison bring a Bible along with the Koran? That he chose not to is the narcissism of multiculturalism that I referred to: The individual’s culture trumps the national culture.You don’t have to be Christian to acknowledge that the Bible is the source of America’s values. Virtually every founder of this country knew that and acknowledged it. The argument that founders such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were deists, even if accurate (it is greatly exaggerated), makes my point, not my opponents’. The founders who were not believing Christians venerated the Bible as the source of America’s values just as much as practicing Christians did.
America derives its laws from its Constitution. It derives its values from the Bible. We don’t get inalienable rights from the Constitution; we get them from God. Which is exactly what the signers of the Declaration of Independence wrote: We are endowed with inalienable rights by our Creator, not by government and not by any man-made document. And that Creator and those inalienable rights emanate from the Bible. Keith Ellison’s freedom to openly believe and practice Islam and to run for elective office as a Muslim is a direct result of a society molded by the Bible and the people who believed in it, a fact he should be willing to honor as he is sworn in.
I cannot name any Western European country that does not have a document similar to the American Constitution and something akin to our Bill of Rights. It is, therefore, not the Constitution that has made America unique and a moral beacon to the world’s downtrodden. What has made America unique is the combination of Enlightenment ideas with our underlying Judeo-Christian values. (I have described 24 of those values in 24 columns in 2005, all available on the Internet through www.pragerradio.com.)
It was understood from the beginning of the republic that liberty is derived from God, not from man alone. That is why the Liberty Bell has an inscription from the Bible (from the Torah in the Old Testament) on it, not an inscription from any secular Enlightenment (or ancient Greek) source.
Entire article here
Prager and Eugene Voloch debate here on CNN
Prager on Fox News
And Kevin McCullough of TownHall.com says
Dennis main construct is that since this is a symbolic action, no one man should have the allowance to destroy what that symbolism is, means, and stands for.
He is 100% correct.