As we now well know, ultra-conservative U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr is a theocracy-peddling Catholic fundamentalist who believes “secularism” is destroying America and that he has every right in his official public speeches to promote his faith as the nation’s.

It’s worse than that when you consider his many admirers and supporters think what he’s doing is perfectly fine, even though the Founding Fathers and the Constitution they crafted showed they were clearly fearful of religion insinuating itself — much less forcing itself — into U.S. government affairs.

This is not wild exaggeration.

For instance, listen to what Barr said in an official speech late last year at Notre Dame University, a private Catholic institution in Indiana. He claimed that “the founding generation … believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man” and that its standards are “the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct.”

By “Judeo-Christian,” he effectively means Catholic, because the “Judeo” part has been largely subsumed by long Christian dominance in the U.S., and the original systemic assumptions that undergird Christianity derive from original Catholic dogma that coalesced a century or so after the Romans’ execution of Jesus. Not coincidentally, Barr is a devout, fervent, old-school Catholic.

So Barr, who insists no secular moral system has ever come close to eclipsing what he sees as the the infallible, irrefutable success of “Judeo-Christianity,” is now proposing that American society should adopt wholesale, as gospel so to speak, these ancient religious doctrines.

All of society’s ills flow from nonbelief, Barr tells anyone who will listen.

“Over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses, but I won’t dwell on the bitter results of the new secular age,” he told the Notre Dame audience, adding that many “so-called progressives” are simultaneously “militant secularists.”

By “militant secularists,” he meant American activists who are energetically trying to keep church and state separate, as the Constitution explicitly requires in the First Amendment along with individual, private religious freedom.

Note, importantly in the context of Barr’s speeches endorsing Judeo-Christian doctrines, that the amendment “forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others,” according to the Legal Information Institute website of New York’s Cornell Law School.

Barr’s doing exactly what the Constitution expressly forbids, and as supposedly one of the nation’s premier legal experts, he presumably knows exactly what he’s doing but that due to his proselytizing agenda doesn’t care.

Among his avid supporters is the conservative American Spectator magazine, which published an op-ed after Barr’s Notre Dame speech poo-pooing the poo-pooers.

“The insistence on the separation of church and state has taken a draconian leap,” Spectator opiner R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. wrote using a disingenuous argument. “Not only is religion to be extirpated from all government activity, but even the public mention of religion is also to be frowned upon. Unless, of course, you are against religion.”

He’s implying that secularists are saying religion shouldn’t be mentioned anytime or anywhere in public, when that is not their beef at all. Nonreligious people and fair constitutionalists are instead saying its constitutionally wrong to promote a particular religion — or religion in general (considering atheists are Americans, too) — in an official government context, as a speech by an elected or appointed government official, as Barr was doing.

Barr wasn’t giving a speech as Mr. Joe Blow Regular American exercising his free-speech rights to express himself as he sees fit. He was at Notre Dame as The Attorney General of the United States, and, as such, did not have the right to promote his religion, or any other, as the path the country should take.

The subhead of the Spectator piece — “Today’s secularists are determined to remove all vestiges of religion from American public life” — reveals the lie in their argument. In fact, secularists want to remove religion from all government life.

That’s way different.

The Spectator article also claims that it’s unfair and unequal for secularists to call out believers for speaking while speaking about the same subject themselves. Again, speaking against religion in government utterances is speaking in support of the Constitution, whereas promoting religion in government is prohibited speech.

So, this is what irreligious Americans are up against. Dishonest rhetoric and unearned arrogance from Christian government officials. And apparently no tools to hold them accountable (not unlike unconstitutional presidential conduct).

It’s not just us secularists for which evangelical government officials are burrs under our saddles. For example, the august, 24,000-member New York City Bar Association (NYCBA) is appalled at AG Barr’s religious behavior in his official capacity.

In a letter this week, the NYCBA urged Congress to launch an investigation of Barr, contending that his public remarks “threaten public confidence in the fair and impartial administration of justice.”

The NYCBA’s discomfort with Barr’s official religious pronouncement is not its first formal criticism of the attorney general. In October the group called for him to recuse himself from a Justice Department review of the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine, The Hill reported.

A blog post or snarky submission on Facebook condemning Barr’s behavior (and that of other Trump administration officials) isn’t enough to stem these kinds of ominous incursions of religion into American government.

Everyone who values the Constitution’s codification of church-state separation should resolutely push back whenever religious believers in government try to promote any religion as the religion for the nation.

Demanding no religion in government is not demanding atheism. It demands that neither stance should be the nation’s official doctrine, only reason.

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