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The mayor of a small Texas town has shockingly signed an official proclamation making 2014 the “Year of the Bible.” Mayor Tom Hayden has set up a website for the residents of Flower Mound, Texas, so they can all read the same passages of the bible on the same day, every day.
Hayden is unapologetic, and says he has been trying to raise enough courage to make the proclamation.
“I was nervous about doing this,” said Hayden. “I’ve been thinking about it for two years, and procrastinated about if for as long as I possibly could.”
Local Dallas-Fort Worth Fox station KDFW reports that Hayden “says the proclamation was not law, not voted on by the Flower Mound City Council and not an official town action.”
However, it still raises some questions with some Flower Mound residents.
“He was elected mayor,” said Flower Mound resident Curt Orton. “Not as the spiritual leader of Flower Mound.”
Mayor Hayden claims that the nation’s founding documents are based on the bible, and his official proclamation, which technically is not binding, he says is based on one made by President Ronald Reagan.
In fact, in October, 1982, Congress passed a law making 1983 the Year of the Bible.
“Many of our greatest national leaders — among them Presidents Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, and Wilson — have recognized the influence of the Bible on our country’s development,” Reagan’s proclamation reads.
“The plainspoken Andrew Jackson referred to the Bible as no less than ‘the rock on which our Republic rests.’ Today our beloved America and, indeed, the world, is facing a decade of enormous challenge. As a people we may well be tested as we have seldom, if ever, been tested before. We will need resources of spirit even more than resources of technology, education, and armaments. There could be no more fitting moment than now to reflect with gratitude, humility, and urgency upon the wisdom revealed to us in the writing that Abraham Lincoln called ‘the best gift God has ever given to man . . . But for it we could not know right from wrong.'”
Clearly, this seems unconstitutional — Reagan’s act even more so.
The First Amendment, for anyone who might have forgotten:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Will those who support this also support making next year the Year of the Koran? What about making 2016 the Year of the Atheist?
Religious extremists never seem to grasp that when the push the pendulum hard, it swings in the opposite direction even harder.