On Sunday, as has been the case for as long as I can remember, My family and I went to our local Latter-day Saint chapel and attended worship services. All-in-all it was an unremarkable sabbath, we attended Sacrament Meeting and our Sunday School classes and came home with no greater worry than what we would be eating for dinner that evening. There were no crowds protesting the existence of our chapel, no politicians loudly calling for a moratorium on permits for Mormon chapel or temple construction in the United States, no one calling our patriotism, morality or general decency into question, just an American family going to church and worshiping Deity according to the dictates of our own consciences. I bring this rather banal episode up to illustrate a point that seems to be lost on a rather large and vocal segment of my fellow Americans: We take our freedoms of religion and religious expression for granted and in doing so have developed a disturbing tendency to devalue and debase... Read the rest of this entry »