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Sen. Ashcroft, President-elect George W. Bush's nominee for attorney general, is already facing the kind of liberal assaults that characterized the total war against Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. At root, there is only one liberal objection to the nomination of moral conservatives like Sen. Ashcroft to high office in American government: Liberals understand that such men will not bow down in worship to the spurious requirement that American law and government adopt doctrinaire rejection of all religious influence. The radical doctrine of the "separation of church and state" is really the doctrine of the separation of morality from American life.

Liberals believe that it is unconstitutional for citizens to act on their moral judgments, such as the view that homosexuality is wrong, in their dealings with fellow citizens. They believe that the state has the right coercively to dictate conscience on these points -- and on a civil rights pretext force citizens to accept what is contrary to their religious conscience.

The clearest instance of this tyranny now occurs in the service of the radical homosexual agenda. Liberals pretend that what is at issue in our society now is what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms. But when liberals attempt to use the government to force the Boy Scouts to have homosexual Scoutmasters, the issue is not what goes on in the privacy of somebody's bedroom, but what will be imposed as a matter of law upon the consciences of those whose religious beliefs cannot countenance homosexual practices. The Boy Scouts have stood firm for the principles of moral conscience they profess. They are not striving to persecute anyone but merely to assert their right to establish, for themselves, what shall be the positive principles of probity and character their organization will represent. This is a matter not of private morality but of public right, guaranteed by the First Amendment, which states clearly that government cannot interfere in the free exercise of religion.

Note the specific reference to action. The First Amendment is not chiefly about beliefs and opinions. It is about the free "exercise" of religion and exercise means action and activity. Liberal hostility to Sen. Ashcroft is part of the ongoing attempt to intimidate Americans into accepting government dictation of moral conscience, demanding that we remove from the purview of moral judgment activities that have been essential to the meaning of ethics and decent comportment from time immemorial.

As liberals understand the Constitution, the Boy Scouts of America do not have the right to act on their religious views. In other words, the free exercise of religion does not mean that citizens actually get to exercise religion. It means, rather, that we get to think about it. But when we want to exercise our religious beliefs in a way that goes against the politically correct requirements of those in power, we shall face the coercive force of law. It will come down on our churches and our Christian youth associations to dictate to us what shall be the moral content of our religious conscience.

We simply cannot accept the coercive use of the law to force Americans to accept as moral that which their religious faith and conscience tell them is immoral. We can't accept a specious civil rights argument to remove from legitimate moral judgment human sexual behavior -- which must be subject to moral judgment if it is to remain in the realm of human accountability and responsibility. And that is why we must reject the whole radical homosexual agenda. To accept it is to accept in principle that Americans may not shape their dealings with one another according to the expectation of moral decency.

On the day we accept that view, we will rapidly discover that homosexuals are not the only ones to clamor for release from accountability. Are they the only folks who are subject to passions that arise from their proclivities? Anger, jealousy, violence and many other things are traceable in part to that law in our members which reflects instinct and other inclinations that are not entirely under our control. If we accept the notion that such influences free us from all moral accountability, we haven't liberated anybody. We have destroyed the very idea of human freedom. Human freedom requires that we respect in all human beings the capacity to choose between right and wrong. If we are in fact, in our actions, simply determined by genetic or other circumstances, then the very idea of liberty is a farce. The end of the very notion of moral accountability would mean that our whole way of life is also laughable. What will then be left of the rule of law and of the true liberty which is its fruit?

This fate cannot be avoided if those who seriously intend the secularization of American life have their way. Human history shows clearly that the dominant motivation for individual men and women to seek lives of moral rectitude -- and to expect the same of others with whom they live -- has been the voice of religion and of moral reflection inspired by religious faith. To sterilize moral judgment of religious influence is, for most people, to kill it.

Jews, Muslims, Hindus, have come from all over the world to settle here precisely because they knew that America was founded on Declaration principles and would accordingly not interfere with their religious freedom. But now we are told that having an attorney general who believes that the Constitution and the laws protect the free exercise of religion is a recipe for oppression and prejudice.

The opposite is true, of course. Radically secular liberalism is the real recipe for oppression and prejudice, because although liberals claim to rely simply on the Constitution as the limit to government coercion, in fact they rely on their own personal judgment. The tortured reading of the First Amendment that permits them to demand with force of law that we make no moral judgment against homosexuality arises from their own deep conviction that this is what the Constitution should mean. And therefore we must conclude, I suppose, as have many liberal judges and justices, that we no longer have a government in which the Constitution is truly relevant. The only thing that is relevant is liberal moral probity, liberal moral conscience, liberal moral outrage, governed, as it seems, by no moral principles external to their will.

Here indeed is rich ground for arbitrary government and state sponsored coercion. Sen. Ashcroft should not be afraid to defend America's Declaration heritage of true religious liberty as the real road of freedom and the rule of law, for the benefit of all people. It is the Declaration, a non-sectarian but deeply religious document, that gives us the ground for the real protection of human dignity. The protection of equal rights must be afforded not just to today's liberal favorites but to everyone, simply because they are human beings created by God.

This equal protection under the law is the blessing we receive for founding our country on our respect for the authority of the transcendent God. But it is impossible to secure this blessing unless we acknowledge that even our judgments about right and wrong do not constitute the ultimate tribunal of human dignity. The name of God was invoked at the beginning of America's life in order to free us from the temptation to act like God. This is precisely the meaning of the Declaration. It is precisely the influence of the Declaration that Sen. Ashcroft should champion in defense of the role of religion in American life.