Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Risking One's Sacred Honor

This campaign for Congress is principally designed to promote the idea of "Liberty Under God." This is the Declaration of Independence boiled down to three words.

Technically, legally and officially, we'll be celebrating the signing of that document in about 10 days, even though practically, in reality, and under color of law, it is illegal to teach or believe that document and its message of "Liberty Under God."

If you insist on publicly promoting the message of the Declaration of Independence, or publicly acknowledging your belief in its message, you risk your reputation, your business, your home, your career, and maybe even your life. Or as the Signers of the Declaration of Independence put it, "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

America is an atheistic dictatorship.

Guilty of Believing or Promoting Liberty

If you believe the idea of Liberty in the Declaration of Independence, you can be denied admission to the Bar and the right to practice law. This is the lesson of The Quest of George Anastaplo. Anastaplo put individual liberty ahead of the State, and it cost him his career.

Raphael Konigsberg is another law student who, fully qualified to become a licensed attorney, was denied admission to the Bar. He wrote an editorial stating,

"Loyalty to America, in my opinion, has always meant adherence to the basic principles of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence - not loyalty to any man or group of men. Loyalty to America means belief in and militant support of her noble ideals and the faith of her people. Loyalty to America today, therefore, must mean opposition to those who are betraying our country's traditions, who are squandering her manpower, her honor and her riches."

Obviously, the State Bar concluded, this man is unqualified to be an attorney.

Next time you get called for Jury Duty, tell the judge you believe in the Declaration of Independence and the right of the People to put their conscience ahead of the State. Tell the judge that if the Defendant is being charged with violating an unconstitutional law, you will vote as your conscience tells you to vote, not as the judge instructs the jury to vote. You will find yourself quickly "excused" from jury duty.

If you believe the government is created by the People, and the People have the right to abolish the government if it becomes destructive of their God-given rights, you can be denied American citizenship if you seek naturalization.

In his opinion in the case of American Communications Assn. v. Douds, Justice Robert Jackson, who never graduated from law school (never even graduated from college - he apprenticed in a Jamestown, NY law office and then passed the bar exam), wrote:

The men who led the struggle forcibly to overthrow lawfully constituted British authority found moral support by asserting a natural law under which their revolution was justified, and they broadly proclaimed these beliefs in the document basic to our freedom. Such sentiments have also been given ardent and rather extravagant [p440] expression by Americans of undoubted patriotism.

A surprising catalogue of statements could be compiled. The following are selected from Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations, under the rubric "Revolution":

Whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

The community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish government, in such manner as shall be by that community judged most conducive to the public weal.
The Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights, 1776.

It is an observation of one of the profoundest inquirers into human affairs that a revolution of government is the strongest proof that can be given by a people of their virtue and good sense.
John Adams, Diary, 1786.

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to W. S. Smith, Nov. 13, 1787.


"An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters."
Henry Clay, Speech in the House of Representatives, March 4, 1818.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better.
Abraham Lincoln, Speech in the House of Representatives, 1848.

All men recognize the right of revolution: that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.
H. D. Thoreau, An Essay on Civil Disobedience, 1849.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.

Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of a right ought to, reform the old or establish a new government; the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
Declaration of Rights of Maryland, 1867.

The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.
U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, I, 1885.

Quotations of similar statements could be multiplied indefinitely. Of course, these quotations are out of their context and out of their times. And despite their abstract theories about revolt, it should also be noted that Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant were uncompromising in putting down any show of rebellion toward the Government they headed.

The revolutionary origin of our own Government has inclined Americans to value revolution as a means to liberty and loosely to think that all revolutionists are liberals. The fact is, however, that violent revolutions are rare which do more in the long run than to overthrow one tyranny to make way for another. The cycle from revolt to reaction has taken less than a score of bloody years in the great revolutions. The Puritan Commonwealth under Cromwell led but to the Restoration; the French by revolution escaped from the reign of Louis XVI to the dictatorship of Napoleon; the Russians overthrew the Czar and won the dictatorship of Lenin and Stalin; the Germans deposed the Kaiser and fell victims of a dictatorship by Hitler. I am convinced that force and violence do not serve the cause of liberty as well as nonviolence. See Fischer, Gandhi and Stalin, passim.

Justice Jackson is correct. Violent Revolution never works. But our opposition to violent revolution should be more than pragmatic; it should be a moral opposition to all violence, on the part of revolutionaries as well as the violence of the State. Anyone prayerfully contemplating the teachings of the Bible must conclude that the State is evil, and we must submit to it non-violently.

If the Declaration of Independence adds to this indictment of the State the right of individual revolution, it proves that the People are sovereign over the State. The mere belief in Liberty and individual sovereignty, even when combined with a firm repudiation of violent revolution, makes one an enemy of the modern State.

Guilty of Believing in A Nation Under God

It is illegal to teach students in a public school that the Declaration of Independence is really true when it says America is a nation "under God."

• that the existence of God is a "self-evident truth"
• that our rights are the product of intelligent design (not the government)
• that all Americans are duty-bound to conform their lives to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God"
• that our actions must one day pass judgment with "the Supreme Judge of the world"
• that conforming our lives to the laws of Nature and of Nature's God should give Americans "a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence."

The Federal Government says that teachers in government-operated schools paid for by your property taxes cannot "endorse" or "promote" these ideas.

And we wonder why the more government-education a person has, the more likely he is to be illiterate, anti-social, peer-dependent, easily-misled, and amoral. America's Founding Fathers would see government-run education as perhaps the greatest threat to the Republic they created. Government schools are certainly the greatest threat to the idea of "Liberty Under God."

Many Americans still think they are free, but that's only because they are unwilling to risk their career, their liberty, or their social standing. They keep quiet.

To such quiet, risk-averse people, Samuel Adams said:

Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, What should be the reward of such sacrifices? Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plow, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom--go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!

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