Roy Moore, who is all but certain to be reelected to his old seat on the Alabama Supreme Court after being thrown out of the job for refusing to comply with a federal court order, actually tries to claim Thomas Jefferson on his side in making a loony claim about “false religions.”
Moore: Thomas Jefferson in his Bill for Religious Freedom said that would happen, when men presume to restrict your freedom then they will allow false religions to come into your country and it all began when he said ‘well aware that the opinions and beliefs of man depend not upon their own will but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds that almighty God hath created the mind free.’ You see he recognized that God gives him that freedom of conscience and when men come in and try to restrict it what happens is false religions come in and that’s what’s happening in our country today. Christians are being persecuted while people of a religion foreign to our country are doing what they want.
Seriously, could there be more bullshit packed into that statement even if he intentionally tried to sound as dishonest and stupid as possible? I’d love to hear him try to explain what language in Jefferson’s bill supports him. That law was passed by James Madison while Jefferson was out of the country, but upon hearing that the bill had passed, Jefferson said that he was very happy that his Virginia had now established “freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination.” You know, all those “false religions” that Moore thinks should be outlawed.
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matty1
July 11, 2012 at 10:02 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Name one thing that Muslims (I assume that’s who he means by foreign religion) are legally allowed to do that Christian aren’t?
Jasper of Maine
July 11, 2012 at 10:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I hope he does the monument thing again so he can be removed.
MadMax
July 11, 2012 at 10:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@matty1
I think the answer is “liberals are more tolerant of a minority criticizing a majority than the other way around”.
Remember, to these people, having their privileged status questioned (or really even illuminated) is roughly equivalent to the Holocaust multiplied by Communism all raised to the power of Satan plus 9/11.
abb3w
July 11, 2012 at 10:24 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Evidently, Roy Moore has never looked up the actual Jefferson quote; emphasis added:
…it’s complaining about sects of Christianity that want to establish themselves with government support. It seems in Jefferson’s view, that impetus alone is enough to prove their falsity. Though, to give more credit than Roy Moore is likely due, Christianity isn’t alone in this sin; Islam and other religions have done it also, elsewhere in the world.
That said, over the last few years I’ve come to the suspicion that Madison is given far less credit than he deserves, and Jefferson a bit more.
thisisaturingtest
July 11, 2012 at 10:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think when the Bill referenced Moore’s “men [who] presume to restrict your freedom…” they were talking about him and folks like him. From the Bill:
IOW- Moore didn’t just miss the point of the Bill; he got in his car and drove as far away from it as fast as he could to avoid it.
thisisaturingtest
July 11, 2012 at 10:33 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Damn it- I’m going to have to learn either to type faster or less. abb3w beat me to it.
d cwilson
July 11, 2012 at 11:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
matty1:
Allow me to translate the above sentence from Wingnutese to English:
Christians are being prevented from persecuting other religions.
Area Man
July 11, 2012 at 12:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Build mosques.
Oh wait.
a miasma of incandescent plasma
July 11, 2012 at 2:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ha! I wonder what country he thinks Christianity is from.
Hercules Grytpype-Thynne
July 11, 2012 at 4:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Or he has and doesn’t understand it. It does, after all, have a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 40.
(I don’t know about Flesch-Kincaid, though. I entered the first two sentences of Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book into a couple of different online calculators and they give it a grade level of 9, which seems high.)
Aliasalpha
July 11, 2012 at 10:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If this bloke was thrown out for refusing to comply with the law, shouldn’t he also be disqualified from ever being in the job again?