Editor, Times-Union: The following is the third part of my explanation for section 3 of my proposed constitutional amendment for furthering strengthening religious liberty, the free market of religious choice and maintaining the independence of the institutions of church and state from each other both here and abroad. While section 2 of the proposed amendment, the basic right itself provides general protections to religious liberty, section 3 places prohibitions on various entities mentioned in section 1 from enacting multiple types of infringement. This would provide clear guidelines for legislatures, courts, voters, chief executives and bureaucratic agencies both here and abroad. I will pick up where I left off from the second part of my explantation in my Nov. 23 letter to the editor, which was getting ready to list various examples of the first and most frequent used and wide-ranging type of infringement, which is “persecution and prejudice in all its myriad forms.” Due to the size and format of the original text, plus the word limit for letters to the editor, I have broken it down into a more readable format. Section 3: Specific Prohibitions on Infringement Nor shall such aforementioned entities as a matter of policy or practice during peacetime or war subject the people domestic or foreign whether as a whole, by category, or as individuals to such horrendous and oppressive acts as the following because of their beliefs or disbelief ... (four additional reasons – elimination of competition, mass regimentation, revolutionary goals or an end unto itself-for such “horrendous and oppressive acts” were printed in my Nov. 23 letter to the editor) Infringement 1-Persecution and Prejudice 1. “campaigns of mass extermination, execution by judicial or extrajudicial means, torture, involuntary medical experimentation” 2. “coerced psychiatric care, forced labor, imprisonment” 3. “the dehumanization of slavery or serfdom” 4. “momentary fines, targeted taxation, asset forfeiture” 5. “vilification by propaganda as a means of conditioning the general populace to the eventful oppression and eradication of a targeted group” 6. “to be categorized, catalogued and then branded by a seen or unseen mark as an enemy of the state, second-class citizen or legitimate prey for frenzied mobs” 7. the obliteration of one’s faith or the lack thereof from existence and the annals of history” 8. “disenfranchisement from the political process, civic life, public service or legal standing before the law” 9. “the rationing of, denial of access to, or dispossession from the basic necessities of everyday living” 10. “a forced exodus into a shrouded world of secrecy in one’s own community or exile from one’s native or adopted homeland among other myriad forms of persecution and prejudice.” An explanation of the remaining types of infringement named in section 3 of the proposed amendment will follow shortly in the letters to the editor column. Alexander Houze Leesburg
