RUSH: To the phones, Merrick, New York, this is David. Glad you called, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine, thank you.
CALLER: Good. Now, I was just telling your screener it seems that religion has become a major, major problem in this country. My personal opinion, I feel that we went to war, you know, to free people and we’re becoming the country that we tried to free.
RUSH: How so?
CALLER: Well, it just seems to me that religion is, you know, if you’re not a religious person in this country then you don’t have a voice. You don’t have a say. You’re not entitled to an opinion.
RUSH: Uh, really? I don’t see that. Are you not a religious person?
CALLER: Well, personally I’ve been turned off to religion because of religious people. You know, I find them to be very demanding.
RUSH: Yeah, but is anybody stopping you from expressing your opinion about anything?
CALLER: It’s not so much that, it’s that everything is based, every decision is based on religious things. I understand the country was formed on a religious basis but it’s just become a point where if you’re not a religious guy then, you know, religious people can’t understand why something like Terri Schiavo should have been a personal, private matter with a family matter and not a religious issue. This is the kind of thing that drives a lot of us crazy.
RUSH: Well, you know, I think what’s happening here, David, is a lack of understanding. And the reason there’s a lack of understanding is because there’s a wall of fear. If not you, a lot of people on the left have fear about religious people, and the fear is rooted in the in fact that you think they’re going to try to tell you how to live and they’re going to try to impose things on you.
CALLER: Well, they do every day, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: No, no, no, wait that’s not really what they’re doing. That’s not what they’re doing. You brought up Schiavo. In fact, let’s go to something more recent than Schiavo, and that is the whole week-long mourning and funeral for Pope John Paul II. I said many times that the left is watching this and they’re probably quivering and they’re shaking because they’re afraid. They don’t understand. The reason they don’t understand is because they don’t understand what animated John Paul. John Paul was not out there forcing his way on anybody. He was preaching, but he wasn’t forcing his way on anybody. John Paul’s life was based on three things: The birth, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Pure and simple. Now, if you don’t understand that about him, you will fear him.
If you don’t understand what it is that motivates religious people and why they believe the things they believe, if you just assign them labels like bigot or racist or whatever, you’re not going to really understand who they are. Their business with Schiavo was not to have you do anything. They weren’t trying to force anything on you. They were simply practicing their belief, the belief that life is precious and that particularly in this country, the state doesn’t have the right to sentence innocent people to death. And then we got to hear such great stories that starvation and dehydration are actually euphoric. Well, we know that’s BS. We know that the death of a woman was being sold to us. We also know that on the left, there are people who have their own version of the life issue, and they had to preserve that. Any acknowledgement in America that life is precious threatens the abortion crowd, and just like they’re not going to allow one threat to the judiciary, they’re not going to allow any threat to that.
So Terri Schiavo became a political football in the sense that the left was interested in her death to protect one of their beliefs. The religious right or others on the right were interested in her life because they are interested in everybody’s life, not because they wanted to tell you what to do or how you had to live, but were afraid of allowing this country to go down the path of saying, “Okay, we’re going to allow a court, without anything on paper, to simply terminate the life of a woman.” We’re going to allow the government. The court is a branch of government. The government can decide this now. That scared people.
In terms of the pope or Terri Schiavo, if you don’t understand who religious people are and how it is that they arrive at their beliefs — I would submit to you that people on the left are religious, too. Their God is just different. The left has a different God. There’s a religious left in this country, and the religious left in this country hates and despises the God of Christianity and Catholicism and whatever else. They despise it because they fear it, because it’s a threat, because that God has moral absolutes. That God has right and wrong, that God doesn’t deal in nuance, that God doesn’t deal in gray area, that God says, “This is right and that is wrong.” A lot of people on the left don’t want to hear that. They want to define that for themselves, and they don’t want to be judged and they don’t want anybody casting judgment on them and forcing anything on them so there’s fear. All this fear prohibits and gets in the way of people understanding who other people are. But, you know this business of imposing freedom on people or imposing views on people, it’s not an imposition, freedom isn’t.
Life is not an imposition. I guess it is to some people on the left, but life is not an imposition, but some people look at it as though it is. Those people on the right were simply standing up for their beliefs just like you do on the judges, just like you do on abortion, just like you do on whatever else. Now, we’re not afraid of people on the left. We want to defeat you, but we want to defeat you in the arena of ideas. We want to convince a majority of Americans to agree with us in the arena of ideas, not by a bunch of judges telling you that you’re wrong about something and giving you nothing you can do about it in the arena of ideas. It’s very simple. You just have to cast aside your fear and you’ll be able to understand it plain as day. Religion is not something that’s a fabric of our society. You only think it is because of your fear.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
I want to go back to the previous caller. If you’re just joining us, we had a caller, a liberal caller, he was very nice, but he felt like religion is just too much a part of everything in America. He feels like it’s being forced on him and he doesn’t think it’s right and so forth and so on. I had a long conversation with him about it. I know he represents the fear of a lot of people on the left. It’s just fear. It’s total fear, and I’ll tell you here’s the root of the fear. Let’s just boil it down to two groups for the sake of it now. I know it’s far more complicated and intricate than this, but for the sake of this discussion we’ll make it simple. You’ve got people who believe in God and you have people who don’t. The people that don’t believe in God are called humanists, they’re secular. And they’re the ones that want all the nativity scenes taken out of the town square and they want any reference to religion taken out of Christmas and all this even though it’s a religious holiday, that’s who they are. They don’t believe in God. They don’t believe in God for their own reasons but I think part of it is fear.
So you have people who believe in God and people that don’t. You have people who look at their pet cat and say, “God made that,” and they marvel. You look at humanists, secular humanists who look at their pet cat, and say, “mongrel.” They may love the cat, but they don’t care where it came from. They’re not at all intrigued where it came from, and they’re not dazzled. They look at the heavens and they just see specks of white. They do not see what is obviously some force way beyond our comprehension that’s able to assemble all this and put it together. They don’t see it. They’re threatened by it for whatever reason. Other people do. Other people live in constant wonderment at the creation of the universe and our little speck of it.
Now, the people who have the fear, the people who are secular, who don’t think there’s anything divine in anything, and there’s a reason for that, too. If there’s no God it means who’s supreme? Human beings. Human beings are supreme. Human beings set the rules, not some Bible, not some unseen force that says what’s right and wrong. That’s not for them, humans do this, humans decide, the humans decide. If they want to worship a tree as a God, they can do it without committing sin, and they won’t be worried about it. So humans are the focal point of everything. That’s where global warming comes from. We have the power to destroy the earth. We didn’t create it. We couldn’t create it. We couldn’t cause global warming, but we couldn’t stop global warming but to them we can cause it.
All of the things that religious people invest in God, they invest in human beings, and the world orients and evolves around human beings. But to those of you on the left, you secular people, you’re not compelled to practice any religion, nobody is enforcing that on you. The Schiavo case has nothing to do with anybody’s right not to practice religion. The Schiavo case had no effect on anybody personally whatsoever. What Schiavo was about was Congress acting so the federal courts would review whether her life was being taken in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. It was constitutional. Everything that happened on the right side in the Schiavo case happened as a result of the Constitution, pure and simple. Everything that happened on the left side of the Schiavo case happened because of the fear on the left, on the secular side, that the constitutional side would win.
Now, the discrimination. The liberals can call here and act all afraid or angry or put out that religious people or people of faith are taking over, but I think the discrimination is the other way around. If you and your community want to post the Ten Commandments in the public square, guess what? You can’t. That’s under attack. Tell me how the religious right is winning on this? If you in your community want school children to have the opportunity to say the Pledge of Allegiance, that’s under attack if you put the word “God” in it. If you and your community want religious symbols displayed in the public square, that’s under attack, and you probably are going to lose, till you fight back. If you want to look at who’s causing the problem, who’s causing discrimination, who’s discrimination against whom, who’s trying to force what on whoever? You know, by putting a religious symbol and nativity scene in a town square, you’re not forcing that on anybody. You’re not saying that they’re compelled to go revere it. They’re not even compelled to go look at it. But the people on the secular left look at it, they get scared.
They don’t even want to see it. It’s like showing Dracula the cross. They don’t even want to see it, it scares them so much. And so just like political correctness is designed to stop people from saying what secular leftists don’t want to hear, so are the attacks on religious people so that secular leftists don’t have to see what they don’t want to see because seeing what they don’t want to see challenges their weak belief system. Hearing what they don’t want to hear challenges their weakly structured intellectual belief system. So the fear is on their side. Nobody is compelled to do anything.
Now, the Constitution — and again this is for those of you on the left — the Constitution prevents a government religion being imposed on you, as it was in England. It doesn’t say that you’re not to be offered the opportunity to be religious, and it doesn’t say that you’re not to be offended from religious symbols. There’s no constitutional right that you won’t be offended. It’s not there. Now, give liberal judges enough time and it will be enshrined in the Constitution, that we all have a right not to be offended and wait till we start litigating that. But it’s not there now. You do not have a right not to be offended from religious symbols or references to God. And so since you’re not to be offended, you’re not going to allow yourselves to be offended, you have to purge from public aspects of society all of these things that offend you, because you have appropriated to yourselves a right not to be offended. But if you don’t want to practice religion then don’t practice it.
I guarantee all of you secularists and leftists out there, you would have hated America just as much prior to the time when the Supreme Court in 1947 ruled that there’s a wall of separation between church and state. Do you know that’s the first time that it was actually ruled? We think that it’s in the Constitution, a wall of separation and it’s not there. There’s no such thing. This is another example of how the Constitution has been bastardized by liberalism. There’s no such thing in the Constitution. It was in 1947. It’s not that long ago, a Supreme Court decision that found a wall of separation between church and state. A bunch of libs. So, you could go back, you libs could go back prior to that, back to 1945, and you still would be confronted with religious people, they were all over the place, they’ve been all over this country ever since it was founded. So even after the Supreme Court says, “There is a wall of separation between church and state,” you’re still afraid, even though the Supreme Court’s given you what you want, the so-called wall, but somehow the wall doesn’t seem to be stopping the religious.
So you’ve got to jump over the wall and you’ve got to stop them yourself when it comes to nativity scenes or whatever. I still maintain that all this is about a total lack of understanding and a fear that is felt, quivering in corners, folks, these liberals do when they start, you know, imagining the strength of faith. I mean what would you rather have faith in, you know, God or yourself? You need both, but, you know, the people that only have faith in themselves and their fellow human beings, imagine the dismal, miserable existence that is. If you only have faith in your fellow human beings and you look around the news every day what are our fellow human beings doing to each other? It’s not a pretty sight.