Pastor Max Forsythe

During the Great European and World War, the allied forces confronted the Central Powers on the entrenched Western Front for four long years. In 1918, both sides expended their remaining resources in a final rush of intense fury to crush their enemies decisively. From the channel coast inland for many miles, the Commonwealth forces were organized in five armies. A few miles behind the front a single narrow gauge railway trundled the mountains of munitions, and sundry supplies to support the long suffering British Expeditionary Force. Had the Imperial forces of Germany positioned the majority of their air groups to knock out that strategic supply line, the war to end wars may well have had a different outcome.

Again, fifty years later – in 1968, I had the honor of serving in the Regular Army of the United States. I was stationed in Europe and I still remember the late summer invasion of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact. My unit spent a week deployed in the forests and fields of Bavaria and we almost believed that the balloon was going up and that we would have to expend our lives to hold onto the River Rhine. The crisis passed and years later I read that there were contingency plans to send allied commando teams deep into Poland to take out the six key railway bridges over which the bulk of Soviet munitions, supplies and reinforcements would have to travel. The achievement of that target could have decided the outcome, if the Cold War had gone hot during my last few weeks in the military.

I say all of this to introduce an idea whose time has come in another war, a religious war that has already consumed almost as many lives as the great wars of the last century. It is a Thirty Year War in which we are engaged against the forces of darkness – a spiritual war against the anti-religion of these latter days. Our enemy is a religion – a fact well established by The United States Supreme Court. In a 1961 case (Torcaso v. Watkins) the court declared that “those religions founded on different beliefs” were just as valid as “those religions founded on a belief in the existence of God.” Footnote 11 to that decision, which was concerned with “religions founded on different beliefs,” contains the Court’s specific citation of Secular Humanism as a religion.

In a further case “The Supreme Court refers to the important 1957 case of (Washington Ethical Society v. District of Columbia) in its holding that Secular Humanism is a non-theistic religion within the meaning of the First Amendment.” The Washington Ethical Society had applied for tax exemption as a religious organization, and we could certainly take the court’s decision to understand that the society was simply one “denomination” within the extended family of similar and sympathetic organizations. For twenty years or more I have tried to explain how this “UnCola” type of religion has become the dominant state endorsed secular religion in the United States! It is time that someone listens, because thirty years of destroyed lives, ruined families, public exhaustion and often futile tactics to overturn (Roe v Wade) on legal, biblical, ethical and moral grounds is long enough! It is time to take the strategic high ground and seek to burn the bridges of public financial support for the most irreligious religion ever to become established in any, so called civilized state.

We can and should use the same constitutional religious establishment clause for separation of church and state which has been used against us. We finally need to deny the life-blood of public monies to the state religion as it exists. At the very least, such a success would lessen the impact of these irreligious faiths and force the secular-humanist liberals to finance their own establishment. If we are to finally prevail against the forces of darkness, we need to level the playing field and stop letting them use our own tax monies against us. And I would be willing to think the public would find more than just a casual interest in our campaign, since any success would touch and benefit their pocket books, which we have to admit – is just as real and important to the average person as their hearts and minds.

At this very moment, Governor Taft is wringing his hands trying to find more money to spend in a bloated state budget that in less than a dozen years has doubled. In fact as part of this campaign, we can pointedly ask the Governor several questions today. The first and most obvious is this:

Governor Taft: What happened to a million and more Ohio tax-payers who have been slaughtered these last thirty years? Would there even be a financial crisis if they were alive and financially viable?

Second – and this is where we have to campaign long and hard:

Governor Taft: do you have the moral strength, and the political will, to shut down the ongoing supply of tax monies to the varied and assorted Secular-religious organizations receiving public funds?

Specifically today, on this dreadful anniversary we must also ask pointedly:

Governor Taft: what about the annual three million dollars religious endorsement for Planned Parenthood? Planned Parenthood feeds on millions of state tax dollars, and on hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars. When is that going to stop?

Believe me, there are those within the State government who know all too well that, that sum is tiny in comparison to all of the funds being spent to support every secular-humanist denomination and their para-church organizations. It is not their constitutional right to press their religious vision for a modern society upon the poor suffering taxpayer!

Governor Taft: The question is not: do we raise taxes. The question before our state government is: do we have the vision, the strength, and the character of statesmanship to effectively cut off the supply line to organizations whose religious success means death to over one million (and counting) Ohio citizens.

Governor Taft: Answer that question, and help us end the tragedy of this thirty year war for all of our sakes. A free and prosperous people deserve nothing less!