Reichskonkordat

The following is not an attempt to equate liberals with Nazis because comparisons such as that are idiotic and therefore only made by liberals formulating arguments against Republican tax and budget proposals.

The purpose of this post is to highlight how fanatical religious like political movements, such as liberalism, attempt to remove competing religious views from the national discourse. This is because ultimately the liberal seeks to create a "religion of the state", meaning that devotions to the old religions get replaced with devotion to the state and to the political party in power. This is what is behind the selective accusations against the Catholic Church of 1st amendment violations, that I outlined previously.

Let's look at what the 1st amendment actually says, focusing on the part about the relationship between church and state:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

These words are crystal clear. There isn't much interpretation to be made here. Basically, the government will not establish a state religion and will not interfere with the free practice of religion. Notice how the words say what the government shall not do. It says absolutely nothing about what the members of a religion can and cannot do. The 1st amendment was absolutely never meant to muzzle members of a religion when it came to their right to petition their government just as any other citizen would. Notice how the right to free speech comes immediately afterwords in the text. I think the order that these rights were listed may not have been random. I say this because the liberal interpretation of the 1st amendment has increasingly been that religions and religious people are not permitted to petition their government based on points of view that are in any way derived from their religious beliefs. This line of thought is in direct opposition to what the 1st amendment is saying because this would in effect "prohibit the free exercise" of their religion by forcing these people to give up other enumerated rights in order to be permitted to continue practicing their religion.

The recent contraception mandate is an obvious example of what I am saying. The government made a law that the Catholic Church is fiercely opposed to. Catholics voiced their opposition by petitioning their elected representatives. Liberals then accused the Catholic Church of violating the separation of church and state because they were somehow infusing their religious beliefs into politics. Even if we ignore the numerous secular arguments against the contraception mandate, (chief amongst them being that access to birth control is not an issue for the vast majority of women and there are already multiple programs available to help poor women obtain birth control, which is why birth control is available to 99% of women who want it according to the CDC) and assume that opposition to the mandate is based purely on religious ideology, this still doesn't change the fact that these religious people have every right to lobby against the new law, as guaranteed by the 1st amendment.

What makes this line of attack against Catholics even more disturbing is that it is applied selectively. I have already discussed this in a previous post, but the basics of what I said were that liberals only roll out this argument when a particular religious institution is lobbying against their proposal. However, when a religious group agrees with their proposal, such as in the case of ObamaCare, there are absolutely no complaints from the left. Conversely, notice how Republicans never once cited 1st amendment violations when the Catholics lobbied on behalf of ObamaCare.

The Reichskonkordat, was an agreement between the Catholic Church and Nazi Germany in 1933 that effectively guaranteed religious freedom to the Catholic Church in Germany if the Church agreed to stop any form of "Political Catholicism" within Germany. This was meant to remove Catholic opposition to Nazi policies and to ensure that the loyalty of the citizens of Germany would not be split between the church and the party. This is basically the same vision liberals have for religion in the United States; Tolerated so long as their viewpoints do not interfere with the Church of Liberalism. 

As an aside, the history of the Catholic Church and Nazism is an interesting read, and is a history that has long been perverted by liberals.