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Judge Brown: The New Civil War

On the same day as “Justice Sunday,” one of the centerpieces of the fight over President Bush’s judicial nominees, Janice Rogers Brown, spoke on the “faith” war in the United States. In her talk, Judge Brown claimed that “people of faith were embroiled in a ‘war’ against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots.” Though her office will not make the text available, a news agency present was able to get some excerpts from her speech:

“There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It’s not a shooting war, but it is a war.”

“These are perilous times for people of faith. Not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”

America has moved away from the religious traditions on which it was founded. “When we move away from that, we change our whole conception of the most significant idea that America has to offer, which is this idea of human freedom and this notion of liberty.”

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Atheism “handed human destiny over to the great god, autonomy, and this is quite a different idea of freedom…Freedom then becomes willfulness.”