Skiers and boarders beware: Ski areas are opening but the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) hopes to tumble one symbolic guardian from your sport's terrain.
Anti-religionists aim to remove a statue of Jesus from near the top of Chair 2 at Montana's Whitefish Mountain Resort.
Local Knights of Columbus erected the figure in the 1950s. Many members were World War II veterans wanting to replicate sculptures they saw while fighting in the European mountains.
The U.S. Forest Service, cowed by false assertions that religious displays on public land are illegal, wants Jesus gone. And the FFRF intelligensia waves its misleading "separation of church and state" banner.
Supporters of the ski-slope Jesus hope to protect the statue by listing it on The National Register of Historical Places, which enrages Annie Laurie Gaylor of the FFRF.
"This has been an illegal display," she says. "Just because a violation is long lasting doesn't make it historic. It makes it historically bad … all the more reason to get rid of it."
Ah yes, the history spat. Those mis-interpreters of the First Amendment, who plot to erase religious affection from the public square, don't know their history. They moronically highlight their ignorance of our American culture and founding documents.
"Separation of church and state" is nowhere in our Constitution. One is hard-pressed to find one historical paper without a Judaic/Christian remark. The Jeffersonian metaphor, written in a personal letter, was absent until it was enlisted by Justice Hugo Black in 1947. The phrase was, however, in Article 124 of the Soviet Constitution, and we know the results of that value system.
As to public religious indicators, the determined anti-faith folks shout the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. …" Yet they ignore the Free Exercise Clause, "... or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Look beyond our documents to our public buildings, symbols and communities to note the reinforced truth of our history.
The Ten Commandments may have been banished from parks and public schools, but Moses and his laws live throughout the U.S. Supreme Court building in paintings, reliefs, as well as on the chamber doors themselves. A Court guide recites that the many and varied etched, painted and sculpted Moses-plus-tablets represent the Constitution's first 10 amendments.
Moses brought forth the Ten Amendments? I'm still laughing.
No doubt the FFRF wish list includes bulldozers, sledgehammers and sandblasters for their crusade.
The Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the U.S. Capitol, the Library of Congress, Arlington National Cemetery, the National Archives, the Senate and House office buildings and the Korean Veterans' Memorial are a few that would join the Supreme Court building in being scraped bare.
Destroyed would be our currency, along with the majority of state seals, which carry religious imagery and phrases. Here in Colorado, a somewhat irreverent state, our seal reads "Nil Sine Numine," Latin for "nothing without the Diety."
Offending communities would be renamed. Las Cruces and Santa Fe, N.M., Smyrna, Ga., Providence, R.I., St. Augustine, Fla., St. Paul and St. Cloud, Minn., Bethlehem and Nazareth, Pa., Hebron, N.Y., New Canaan, Conn., Damascus, Va., San Antonio, Texas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and San Louis Obispo, Calif., are among the hundreds.
Every county in Louisiana is a parish; Assumption, Ascension, St. John the Baptist. Then there are the national forests; Los Padres, San Bernardino, Shasta-Trinity, San Isabel, San Juan …
Arrogant lunacy characterizes the FFRF and similar cantankerous groups. Every lawsuit and screed rails against U.S. history and our constitutionally protected religious expression.
A word of warning for those blowhards if they also happen to be skiers or boarders: Stop with your campaign to remove Jesus from a mountain He created. And keep to the center as you traverse the slopes. Should you drift toward the trees, one of His majestic pines may just lean low and smack you upside the head as you zip past.
The Almighty does not suffer fools well.