Greetings, and welcome to Monday, Nov. 9, 2026. Veterans Day is Wednesday, so this is a good week to thank someone who served. On this date in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and there's a lesson in that for anybody who thinks government can keep people from leaving. Just ask New York and California.
My calendar says it's World Freedom Day, Scrapple Day, and Chaos Never Dies Day. Celebrate freedom and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which a president proclaimed a national observance back in 2001. Fry up some scrapple for breakfast if you can find it north of Pennsylvania. And if anyone doubts that chaos never dies, point them toward the House Democrats' phone lines.
Today in History:
1620: Passengers on the Mayflower sight land at Cape Cod after more than two months at sea.
1872: The Great Boston Fire breaks out, destroying more than 700 buildings in the city's commercial district.
1906: Theodore Roosevelt leaves for Panama to inspect canal construction, becoming the first sitting president to travel abroad.
1918: Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates, and Germany is proclaimed a republic two days before the World War I armistice.
1935: United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis forms the Committee for Industrial Organization, later the CIO.
1938: Nazis launch Kristallnacht, a two-day wave of attacks on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues across Germany and Austria.
1965: A power failure plunges New York and much of the Northeast into darkness, leaving some 30 million people without electricity. I can still remember scanning the AM band with my portable radio. There weren't many stations on that night.
1967: NASA launches Apollo 4, the first test flight of the Saturn V rocket. The same day, the first issue of Rolling Stone hits newsstands.
1989: East Germany opens the Berlin Wall, and crowds pour through the checkpoints and climb onto the wall to celebrate.
Birthdays Today include: Benjamin Banneker, self-taught astronomer and surveyor who helped lay out Washington, D.C.; Hedy Lamarr, actress from Samson and Delilah and co-inventor of the frequency-hopping technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; Spiro Agnew, the 39th vice president; Carl Sagan, astronomer and host of Cosmos" Bob Gibson, Hall of Fame pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals; Mary Travers, singer with Peter, Paul and Mary ("Leaving on a Jet Plane") (See the attached note below); Tom Fogerty, guitarist with Creedence Clearwater Revival ("Proud Mary"); Lou Ferrigno, bodybuilder and star of The Incredible Hulk" and Nick Lachey, singer with 98 Degrees. If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us here.
A correction: in the Nov. 7 column, I listed Mary Travers among that day's birthdays. That was wrong. She was born on Nov. 9, which is why she's here, too. My bad.
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So, during the early '80s, church after church in my neighborhood shut down their carillons because of neighborhood noise complaints. Nowadays those musical chimes are replaced by the local mosque doing a call to prayer at volume 11. Noise complaint? What noise? We've gotta respect their religion and their culture. I've seen it in my own little berg, and heard from readers about similar happenings in theirs.
For years now, we've heard the same refrain from the political left: Respect Islam. Be sensitive to Islamic religious beliefs. Accommodate Islamic religious practices. Understand that Islam has its own traditions, its own moral framework, and its own place in the world.
Fair enough, as far as it goes. Religious freedom is an American principle. People have the right to worship as they choose, and government has no business discriminating against them because of their faith.
But here's where things get interesting and. frankly, disturbing.
Often from the same people, we hear an entirely different message about Christianity and Judaism. Suddenly, religion has no business influencing public policy. Keep religious beliefs out of government. Stop the imposition of religious morality on the population. Out comes "separation of church and state," brandished as though Thomas Jefferson had personally carved a constitutional ban on religious people bringing their convictions into the public square.
He didn't. The phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution. It comes from a Jan. 1, 1802, letter Jefferson sent to the Danbury Baptist Association. Those Connecticut Baptists worried about their state's sponsorship of the Congregational Church, not about Christians voting their consciences. And according to the Library of Congress, two days after mailing off his famous "wall," Jefferson attended a church service held in Congress.
Therein lies the tell.
It isn't theocracy that much of the left finds objectionable. It's the moral and cultural tradition that shaped Western civilization: the Judeo-Christian ethic.
Consider the examples.
On Aug. 13, 2010, President Barack Obama used a White House Iftar dinner to wade into the fight over the proposed Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero. "As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country," he declared. "And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances."
Constitutionally, he had a point. Government shouldn't discriminate against a congregation because people dislike its address. (Never mind that the next day, with the backlash building, Obama insisted he "was not commenting" on "the wisdom" of the project. Profiles in courage.)
When the subject turns to the public expression of Christianity, though, the temperature drops considerably.
The ACLU has spent decades challenging government-sponsored religious displays, the Ten Commandments chief among them. In 1980, the Supreme Court struck down Kentucky's classroom Ten Commandments requirement in Stone v. Graham. When Texas passed Senate Bill 10 in 2025, the ACLU and its allies sued within weeks. Then they sued again. Then they filed a class action aimed at every Texas school district not already in court.
They lost. In April, the full Fifth Circuit upheld the law 9-8, with the majority treating Stone as obsolete after the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. In August, the ACLU asked the Supreme Court to step in.
There's a legitimate constitutional argument to make about government-sponsored religious displays. Yes, the First Amendment does prohibit government establishment of religion. But that's not my point. My point is the contrast in the rhetoric.
When Muslims seek religious accommodations, the left tells us that sensitivity to their beliefs is essential to a tolerant society. On July 14, Rep. Nellie Pou (D-N.J.) and 27 House colleagues sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding that ICE hand Muslim detainees the Quran at intake, provide hijabs on request, set aside prayer spaces with prayer mats, and make halal meals "a standard offering."
Nothing inherently wrong with that. Religious liberty should mean religious liberty. Thing is, where's that same enthusiasm when Christians object to government policies that conflict with their convictions?
When Lorie Smith, a Christian web designer in Colorado, won the right not to create websites celebrating same-sex weddings in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, President Joe Biden announced he was "deeply concerned" and urged Congress to act. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) called the ruling "horrifying" and demanded that Democrats expand the Supreme Court immediately.
Then there's the Equality Act, which every House Democrat backed in 2023. The bill expressly bars anyone from invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as a defense. That's the same RFRA that passed the House unanimously in 1993, sponsored by a young congressman named Chuck Schumer. University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock, a religious-liberty scholar who supports same-sex marriage, warned that the bill would "crush" religious dissenters. For the record, the bill was H.R. 15 in the House sponsored by Rep. Takano, and was S. 5 in the Senate, sponsored by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Big shock to see those names attached to such a bill, huh?
Why does religious conviction so often become an unacceptable excuse when the person holding it is a Christian, or a Jew?
Here's the kicker. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, a coalition of more than 300 Christian, Muslim, and Jewish parents in Montgomery County, Md., sued for the right to pull their elementary-age kids out of LGBTQ-themed storybook lessons. The lead plaintiff, Tamer Mahmoud, is a Muslim father. The school system fought them all the way to the Supreme Court, which sided with the parents 6-3 last year. All three Democratic-appointed justices dissented.
Funny how all that sensitivity to Muslim religious practice evaporated the moment Muslim parents lined up alongside Christians and Jews to defend traditional morality. The left's tolerance, it turns out, depends less on which faith you hold than on which side of the culture war your faith puts you on. And the side it reliably opposes is the one defending the moral order the Judeo-Christian tradition built.
Critics routinely accuse a Christian who believes marriage, family, human dignity, and the sanctity of life should inform public policy of plotting a theocracy. But when someone advocates a political system grounded in Islamic religious law, the same crowd lectures us about cultural context, respect for religious traditions, and the sin of judging another civilization by Western standards. We're allowed to do that. This is, after all, America, not Iran.
Our Constitution protects the right to practice a religion and, equally important, the right not to practice one. It doesn't establish Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or atheism as the official religion of the United States.
But one distinction keeps getting lost, and this is what I need you to pick up today from this column if nothing else: Keeping government from establishing a religion is not the same thing as keeping religious people from influencing government. Indeed, as our founders said repeatedly, it's vital that they DO in fact influence governmental actions.
Recommended: The Dangerous Illusion of a Neutral Culture
Let's be very clear about this: The First Amendment doesn't require Americans to check their convictions at the door before participating in public life. A Christian has every bit as much right to advocate policy informed by biblical morality as an atheist has to advocate policy informed by secular humanism. The Constitution prohibits the establishment of religion. It does not establish secularism as a compulsory national ideology.
So if the principle is religious liberty, apply it universally. If the principle is that government shouldn't impose religious doctrine, apply that universally, too. No special exemptions for one religion, and no special hostility toward another.
But when the left celebrates and protects one religious tradition while treating another (the one at the root of our own Western culture) as a dangerous influence on public life, it's reasonable to ask whether we're discussing religious freedom at all.
The evidence suggests the left's objection isn't to religion influencing society. It's to the influence of one particular cultural tradition and the civilization it built. Our own tradition and our own civilization. Let's put that another way: Perhaps the left doesn't object to theocracy quite as much as it claims. Perhaps what it objects to is the Judeo-Christian ethic.
And why? Because the Hebrews, and the Christians after them, gave the West two revolutionary ideas: a single Lawgiver whose law binds kings and governments as surely as it binds peasants, and an individual human being made in His image, with a worth no state grants and no state can revoke. Those two ideas sit at the foundation of Western culture, and their melding produced America.
I've said many times in these spaces that America simply could not have come into being without those ideas at its root. (Here's one such from about a year back. ) Can you imagine an America built on Islam as its philosophical foundation? I certainly can't. On paganism? We both know better. On atheism? Any of the polytheistic cultures? Obviously not. The truth, like it or not, is this: Absent the Judeo-Christian ethic, we'd never have lasted this long. Refer to this column from about a year back for further insights.
I've also said many times over the years that a government's first duty is to defend the culture that gave it life, and where possible to extend its influence. America and the rest of the West owe that culture primarily to Jews and Christians. So, the reality is, what we're seeing from the left is a rejection of Western culture itself. Go ahead and tell me how that's not a clear and present danger to our way of life.
And that tells you something about the rising antisemitism and anti-Christian sentiment on the anti-American left. I suggest to you that the Jew hatred amounts to a tacit admission that the Judeo-Christian ethic is the foundation of America as it was founded, and the source of its greatness. Further, that's what they're trying to destroy.
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Thought for the Day: The top 1% made it possible to get just about anything delivered to your door within a day, so that the bottom 1% can steal it off your porch.
VIP members: Your voice matters, so I ask you: What are your thoughts?
Take care today, gang. I hope to see you tomorrow. Bring a friend, will you?