Lawrence O'Donnell is Right

On Thursday, President Obama’s inaugural committee disinvited Rev. Louie Giglio from delivering the invocation. Giglio’s sin was preaching a sermon that was not hateful, and that stuck to a biblical position that until last year was Obama’s own public position. He is being Chick-Fil-A’d. Does the pastor have the right to hold that position, or does he not? Should holding that position preclude him from participating in a public ceremony, or should it not? That’s the real issue here — do we have freedom of conscience or must we all conform?

Obama will take his oath of office on a stack of Bibles, one that belonged to Abraham Lincoln and another that belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As symbols go it’s tough to improve on that — one freed the slaves, the other fought for a colorblind society.The latter was a reverend himself, for whatever that’s worth.

But if Obama is going to have his inaugural committee disinvite a preacher for sticking to a position articulated in the Bible, why then should he take his oath of office on any Bible?

If Obama is being consistent, then he should not. That’s what self-described socialist Lawrence O’Donnell is saying, in his slightly bent and overheated way, here. He’s right.

Now, as has happened in other debates, I now expect some conservatives to misunderstand or go with a libertarian-lite position that, of course, the Bible doesn’t belong in that ceremony despite the fact that it forms the basis for our society and text from it is engraved into the United States Supreme Court building. That would be a mistake. Giving the other side its inch will whet their appetite to take another mile.

We should be clear about what’s going on with all this. O’Donnell is very clear in his comments, that he believes the Bible should be rewritten to suit our whims or it should be done away with. Most leftists aren’t that honest, but it is objectively what they believe, or at the very least, it’s where their energy will lead. There is and has long been a movement on the left to marginalize Christianity and drive Christians from the public square. One of the many things that drove me into a life in public comment was to resist that movement. It’s also among the reasons that the Second Amendment is so necessary; the left and the Democrats have a history of enslaving and lynching people that they don’t like, and I don’t intend to be their victim. But I’m under no illusions; the marginalization of Christianity is succeeding, faster than I expected, and it is gathering pace. The fact that a pastor can be disinvited from a presidential inauguration for holding a biblical position that still gets majority votes from California to North Carolina, while the federal government is now forcing Christians to service abortion and abortifacient drugs against our will, says where we are as a nation. The left is objectively anti-Christian in its rhetoric and actions. Our current government is powered by that ideology.