Concerned Women for America - The Sound of Silence in Indiana

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The Sound of Silence in Indiana 1/12/2006
By Robert Knight

When lawmakers won’t do their jobs, it invites judicial and executive tyranny.

This article was published January 12, 2005, on WorldNetDaily.com.

Even as liberal senators in Washington were painting mild-mannered U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito as an extremist bent on destroying everything good and decent, Indiana state senators were demonstrating where the real problem lies in our wounded republic.

In the Hoosier state, the Senate opened its session on Monday with 20 seconds of silence. That's because U.S. District Judge David Hamilton, at the behest of the local American Civil Liberties Union, decided that a prayer in the Indiana House violated the First Amendment last summer when the preacher mentioned the name of Jesus.

In a way, the silent opening was fitting. You could almost envision the senators sitting there with muzzles on their jowls, adjusting them for comfort.

But the culprit is not the corrupt courts, where judges routinely issue sweeping rulings that would make Fidel Castro green with envy. It's not even liberal legislators like Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who abet the steady destruction of self government in the name of "diversity." They're just acting like, well, liberals.

The real problem is spineless elected officials who know better but refuse to assert their authority and rein in our robed masters. Had Judge Hamilton been around during Thomas Jefferson's presidency, he undoubtedly would have tried to shut down the prayers that opened each session, and also the church services every Sunday in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives, which Jefferson attended regularly.

I say only "try." Can you imagine how the Congress of 1804 would have reacted to such a judicial dictate? They'd throw the bum out. These men actually believed that they had established, under God and through much spilled blood, a self-governing republic. To this day, Congress opens with prayer. If it's good enough for Washington, D.C., why isn't it good enough for Indiana?

Let's pretend for a moment that Indiana's senators were made of the same stuff as our Founders. More.