Like Your Freedom? Thank a Church.

[saveliberty]

Andrew Klavan, Pajamas Media:

Pajamas Media

 

Like Your Freedom? Thank a Church.

 

February 5, 2012 - 5:50 am - by Andrew Klavan

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The Obama administration is insisting that church-affiliated employers pay for birth control in their health care plans. This especially violates the Catholic Church’s doctrine prohibiting the use of contraception. As such, it’s an act of tyranny — an insidious attempt to bring down one of the load-bearing walls of liberty.

 

The idea that churches stand to a great degree apart from the power of the state has its beginning — in my reading of history — in an incident that involved Pontius Pilate before he entered the Gospel stories. Appointed the Roman governor of Judaea in 26 AD, Pilate set up (according to the account of the historian Josephus) a set of Roman standards in the city of Jerusalem. The Romans were famously tolerant about the religions of the people they conquered. They didn’t care if you worshipped your gods — as long as you also worshipped their gods. To ask this was to ask no more than loyalty to Rome, whose gods and government were as one.

[Valin]

@saveliberty

 

This was good conqueror policy and worked well — except in Judaea. The Jews had only one God and he was a jealous one. They felt the Roman display constituted idolatry and a violation of God’s law. They protested to Pilate. Pilate enticed the rabble rousers into the great stadium at Caesarea, then surrounded them with soldiers, swords drawn: Either accept the Roman symbols in the Holy City or die. The Jews, as one, flung themselves on the ground and extended their necks: better to die than to break God’s law.

 

Pontius Pilate; meet the Jews. With his emperor furious at the mess he’d made, Pilate was forced to back down and remove the symbols.

 

I love it!!

[saveliberty]

I am glad, @Valin.