Liberty is the highest value.

It is the ideal that the United States of America was founded upon and should always stand for.

Mark Steyn speaks about this in a discussion with Hugh Hewitt:

I think the United States should stand for liberty, simply because that’s the right thing to do. That’s the idealistic position. The United States should be, have a bias toward liberty. In a real politick sense, I think it’s also good to have a bias toward liberty, because it’s a good way of messing with dictators’ heads. I’m not a great fan of stability in the Middle East. I don’t think the Americans wound up with a lot to show for shoveling all this money at Mubarak for thirty years. So it’s one thing to have a philosophical predisposition toward liberty. And liberty’s the word here rather than democracy, rather than, you know, saying we’re going to have an election on Thursday, and the polling station open at eight, and you can all wave your purple fingers. That’s relatively easy to do. Actually establishing liberty is tough, hard work.

Hard work fighting off collectivism.

The collectivist ideologies of the last couple of hundred years, which so enchanted most Western intellectuals with an hallucination of equality, have a shabby, musty, weary, worn-out look about them now – though some nations are still enchained by them. Equality, other than before the law, is not possible. Any effort to impose economic equality has to be done by central governments which – therefore – instantly become totalitarian tyrannies, and yet still fail to achieve the impossible goal. The French Revolution motto of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is a piece of nonsense. “Fraternity” means nothing, and Liberty and Equality – in the sense that the revolutionaries meant it – are mutually exclusive.

That comunist/socialist ideals are rotting is another point which Mark Steyn makes, saying in the same interview when asked by Hugh Hewitt (referring to events in the Middle East), “What is your hope that the Team Obama is thinking through right now or doing?”:

Well, I don’t think they’re thinking at all, actually. I don’t think that’s something that the Obama team do a lot of. They’re mired in outmoded, polytechnic, Marxist claptrap that even before these recent events was the best part of half a century out of date.

But older, darker, and quite as nasty as the egalitarian type of collectivism is the inegalitarian type, such as Catholicism was in the Middle Ages and Islam is still. Islam, old as it is, remains all too athletically alive, and is a real and present threat to liberty in America.

Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. The Enlightenment dispelled it. Now Islam threatens the continent with a deeper darkness.

A few brave individuals are fighting to keep the light of freedom burning.

One of those individuals is Geert Wilders, the Dutch MP who has dared to speak out against the Islamization of Europe.

His trial resumes today in Amsterdam.

Here is his speech to the court:

The lights are going out all over Europe. All over the continent where our culture flourished and where man created freedom, prosperity and civilization. Everywhere the foundation of the West is under attack.

All over Europe the elites are acting as the protectors of an ideology that has been bent on destroying us [for] fourteen centuries. An ideology that has sprung from the desert and that can produce only deserts because it does not give people freedom. The Islamic Mozart, the Islamic Gerard Reve [a Dutch author], the Islamic Bill Gates; they do not exist because without freedom there is no creativity. The ideology of Islam is especially noted for killing and oppression and can only produce societies that are backward and impoverished. Surprisingly, the elites do not want to hear any criticism of this ideology.

My trial is not an isolated incident. Only fools believe it is. All over Europe multicultural elites are waging total war against their populations. Their goal is to continue the strategy of mass-immigration, which will ultimately result in an Islamic Europe – a Europe without freedom: Eurabia.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Anyone who thinks or speaks individually is at risk. Freedom loving citizens who criticize Islam, or even merely suggest that there is a relationship between islam and crime or honour killing, must suffer and are threatened or criminalized. Those who speak the truth are in danger.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Everywhere the Orwellian thought police are at work, on the lookout for thought crimes everywhere, casting the populace back within the confines where it is allowed to think.

This trial is not about me. It is about something much greater. Freedom of speech is not the property of those who happen to belong to the elites of a country. It is an inalienable right, the birthright of our people. For centuries battles have been fought for it, and now it is being sacrificed to please a totalitarian ideology.

Future generations will look back at this trial and wonder who was right. Who defended freedom and who wanted to get rid of it.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Our freedom is being restricted everywhere, so I repeat what I said here last year:

It is not only the privilege, but also the duty of free people – and hence also my duty as a member of the Dutch Parliament – to speak out against any ideology that threatens freedom. Hence it is a right and a duty to speak the truth about the evil ideology that is called Islam. I hope that freedom of speech will emerge triumphant from this trial. I hope not only that I shall be acquitted, but especially that freedom of speech will continue to exist in the Netherlands and in Europe.

See our posts: The new heresy, January 11, 2011; An honest confession of hypocrisy, October 23, 2010; Civilization on trial, October 11, 2010; A stink of Fox, March 12, 2010; Freedom versus Islam, January 20, 2010; The West on trial, December 16, 2009.

We say in the post below, Hope and change in the Arab world, that the violent revolts could develop into a conflict between a movement for freedom and religious tyranny. We say that if America ignores the dramatic change occurring there, Islamic forces (the militant Iranian Shia regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban-like al-Qaeda) stand a better chance of winning.

Already the dark Islamic forces are positioning themselves to seize power.

Oliver North writes at Townhall:

What’s most important right now is how the Obama administration handles the increasingly intense cries for greater freedom sweeping from Tunisia to Yemen — threatening every authoritarian Muslim regime in that region save one: Iran’s.

The theocrats in Tehran didn’t foment the “Jasmine Revolution” — the youth-driven popular uprising that forced Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the presidential palace he occupied for 23 years. … But the ayatollahs are capitalizing on the expanding chaos.

Expatriate Iranian opposition figures claim that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds force have been dispatched to Tunis “to help guide developments.”

Ominous! And worse news follows – if it is true:

Tehran’s government-controlled Fars News Agency has since quoted Jamil bin Alawi, a Tunisian “student activist,” as saying, “The advanced revolutionary and Islamic models like the Hezbollah of Lebanon can provide a bright and promising prospect for Tunisia.”

Jamil bin Alawi sounds to us – as he does to Oliver North, we guess, since he puts the words “student activist” in quotation marks – like a parrot-mouth for the Ayatollahs rather than a spokesman for the Tunisian revolutionaries.

In Egypt — where riot police and the army are confronting angry protesters with tear gas, batons and gunfire — the Iranians may well see another autocratic regime ripe for Islamic revolution. Student-led riots opposing the 30-year reign of President-for-Life Hosni Mubarak erupted Monday in Cairo and quickly spread throughout the country.

Unlike their counterparts in Tunisia and Lebanon, the Egyptian police and army thus far appear loyal to their leader, Mubarak, and the government has all but shut down press access and communications, including many Internet links. …

Now reports are coming out of Egypt that at least some policemen and soldiers are discarding their uniforms and joining the protestors.

To repeal Obamacare is to resist socialism and to choose freedom.

The House of Representatives’ overwhelming vote (245-189) to repeal the health-care bill which Obama and the Democrats foisted on the nation, is an act of resistance by the new Republican majority against the Democrats’ attempt to turn America into a socialist state. That is the most important thing about it.

As John Podhoretz writes at Commentary-Contentions:

So why bother? That seems to be the general question. The Republican-controlled House can pass it, but it won’t get through the Senate, and even if it did, the president will veto it. Why cast an unnecessary vote? Why have this debate now?

Simple: Where you stand on ObamaCare is now the bright line in American politics, the single issue that defines the difference between the two major voting camps in the United States.

And the Heritage Foundation is of the same opinion:

Last night, the House of Representatives, the legislative chamber of Congress closest to American popular opinion, voted to repeal Obamacare—the increasingly unpopular law which led directly to a change in the control of Congress just three months ago.

Many will tell you that yesterday’s bipartisan vote of 245 to 189 was an exercise in futility—an empty, symbolic measure. Liberals in Congress, the White House and their echo chamber in the media all insist, as NPR has duly reported, that “this measure will go no further.”

Don’t believe this for a single minute. The vote last night was an important step in the democratic process of protecting and conserving our constitutional freedoms.

Our country, it is increasingly clear, has arrived at a pivotal moment – perhaps the pivotal moment – in its history. Together, we face a choice between two futures. One is a collectivist future where the federal government claims ever increasing shares of our income and grants itself the authority to make decisions affecting virtually every aspect of our daily lives. The other future is built upon the idea that individual freedom trumps government authority, and that in those rare cases when solving a problem requires government, the government that governs best is the one that is smallest and closest to the people. That is the future that we should seek – reaffirming our individual liberty, strengthening private markets, shrinking the size of governments, and making decisions wherever possible at the local level rather than in Washington.

No issue joins this debate more dramatically than the question of Obamacare, and what to do about it. It’s not just about health care. The law redefines our centuries-old understanding of the reach of federal authority, indeed whether there are any limits at all to the government’s ability to intrude upon individuals, families, business owners, physicians and other health providers, and state and local governments. Little or nothing will be allowed outside the new regulatory scheme – no alternative state programs, no individuals or businesses that choose not to participate, no truly private market alternatives.

The debate boils down to one big question: Shall we govern ourselves, or let unelected bureaucrats rule us?

Which is to say: Shall we be free or not?

We must make the choice now. We must choose to be free.

As everyone knows or ought to know, socialism and freedom are opposites.

The more socialist a state becomes, the less freedom remains to the people.

Under President Obama the US has become an ever more socialist state; and as  it has become more socialist it has become, of course, less free – though it’s still a long way from the totalitarianism which the Maoists and Alinskyites who officially advise the President would like him to aim for.

To bolster our argument we quote the libertarian free-marketeer John Stossel, who writes:

Last year, I reported that the United States fell from sixth to eighth place … in the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal’s 2010 Index of Economic Freedom. Now, we’ve fallen further. In the just released 2011 Index, the United States is in ninth place. That’s behind Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Ireland [?] and Denmark [?].

The biggest reason for the continued slide? Spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. (State and local spending is not counted.)

The debt picture is dismal, too. We are heading into Greece’s territory. …

New Speaker John Boehner, leader of the Republicans who now control the House, says he wants to cut spending. When he was sworn in last week, he declared: “Our spending has caught up with us. … No longer can we kick the can down the road.”

But when NBC anchorman Brian Williams asked him to name a program “we could do without,” he said, “I don’t think I have one off the top of my head.”

Give me a break! You mean to tell me the Republican leader in the House doesn’t already know what he wants to cut? I don’t know which is worse — that he doesn’t have a list or that he won’t talk about it in public.

The Republicans say they’ll start by cutting $100 billion, but let’s put that in perspective. The budget is close to $4 trillion. So $100 billion is just 2.5 percent. That’s shooting too low. Firms in the private sector make cuts like that all the time. It’s considered good business — pruning away deadwood.

GOP leaders say the source of their short-run cuts will be discretionary non-security spending. They foolishly exclude entitlement spending, which Congress puts on autopilot, and all spending for national and homeland security (whether it’s necessary or not). That leaves only $520 billion.

So even if the Republicans managed to cut all discretionary non-security spending (which is not what they plan), the deficit would still be $747 billion. (The deficit is now projected to be $1.267 trillion.)

This is a revolution? Republicans will have to learn that there is no budget line labeled “waste, fraud, abuse.” If they are serious about cutting government, they will ax entire programs, departments and missions.

I’m not confident they have it in them. …

And we are also supported in our opinion by the economist Walter Williams, who writes:

Here’s the House of Representatives new rule: “A bill or joint resolution may not be introduced unless the sponsor has submitted for printing in the Congressional Record a statement citing as specifically as practicable the power or powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact the bill or joint resolution.” Unless a congressional bill or resolution meets this requirement, it cannot be introduced.

If the House of Representatives had the courage to follow through on this rule, their ability to spend and confer legislative favors would be virtually eliminated. Also, if the rule were to be applied to existing law, they’d wind up repealing at least two-thirds to three-quarters of congressional spending.

You might think, for example, that there’s constitutional authority for Congress to spend for highway construction and bridges. …

But there isn’t. Williams goes on to point out that President James Madison was not persuaded that there should be, though a law establishing such an authority might “facilitate commerce”, and even strengthen “the common defense“. So in 1817, Madison “vetoed a public works bill, saying: “Having considered the bill this day presented to me … which sets apart and pledges funds ‘for constructing roads and canals, and improving the navigation of water courses, in order to facilitate, promote, and give security to internal commerce among the several States, and to render more easy and less expensive the means and provisions for the common defense,’ I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United States and to return it with that objection to the House of Representatives, in which it originated.”

Defense of the nation and the individual citizen is the first duty of government. It is the essential thing that government is for. Yet here was Madison, “the father of the Constitution”, refusing to sign into law a bill that was being promoted as an aid to defense, because he could not reconcile the nature of the expenditure with the Constitution.

“What about handouts to poor people, businesses, senior citizens and foreigners?” Williams asks. And to that too Madison gave an answer:

Madison said, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”

Some of his successors took the same view as Madison: if the Constitution does not authorize a dip into the public purse for this or that purpose, then neither should Congress:

In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill to help the mentally ill, saying, “I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. (To approve the measure) would be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”

President Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill for charity relief, saying, “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.” …

But, someone may ask, doesn’t the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution allow tax-payers money to be spent on “compassionate” projects?

To this President Thomas Jefferson had an answer, Williams tells us:

Suppose [Williams writes] a congressman attempts to comply with the new rule by asserting that his measure is authorized by the Constitution’s general welfare clause. Here’s what Thomas Jefferson said: “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”

And he adds these words of Madison:

“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”

The Constitution was designed to preserve liberty under the rule of law. It was not a set of rules for a Benevolent Association.

If  the government turns itself into an agency for succoring the poor and handicapped, it can only do so by robbing the people of liberty.

Williams quotes a warning given by President John Adams:

“A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

Which means that any governmental program of wealth-redistribution, all socialist legislation  – social security, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, sub-prime housing loans, state-provided education and health-care, government compensation for loss caused by natural disasters, government grants to sport and the arts (to take only the most obvious examples of benevolent spending)  – is unconstitutional and should be repealed and never introduced again.

Then there would be small government, low taxes, and true liberty – and money enough in every earner’s pocket to donate to charity if he chooses to.

We have commented on the trials of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria, both of whom are being prosecuted for telling the truth about Islam. (See our post, Civilization on trial, October 10, 2010.)

Throughout Europe it has become a crime to say anything about Muslims and Islam that Muslims do not like. It makes no difference if what is said is provably true. This means that not only is speaking the truth in this regard a crime, but free speech itself is a heresy.

We wrote that what is really on trial is our civilization. The Western world owes its greatness to the Enlightenment. Now the values with which the Enlightenment endowed us, chief among them freedom and truth – the freedom to search for truth and declare openly what we find –  are under threat. If we are to be returned to the darkness that prevailed in Europe before that dawn of the intellect, to the time when this church or that decided what people were permitted to know and say, and would punish in the cruelest imaginable ways any thinker who challenged the prevailing dogma, our civilization is as surely doomed as was Rome by Christianity.

The darkness is visibly spreading. In Denmark, Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, and Jesper Langballe, Member of Parliament, have been charged with committing the same “crime” as Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

With her usual moral clarity, Melanie Phillips writes about this travesty of justice:

A Danish MP, Jesper Langballe, was convicted of hate speech last month for endorsing Hedegaard’s comments about ‘honour’ violence and sexual abuse within Muslim families. In his statement in court … Langballe wrote about the Orwellian Danish legal rules which effectively convicted him in advance of his trial, causing him to choose to ‘confess’ rather than participate in such a totalitarian ‘circus’.

Now Lars Hedegaard faces a similar circus. Later this month, he is to stand trial for ‘racism’ after he stated about Muslim ‘honour’ violence within families: “They rape their own children.”

In vain did Hedegaard explain the following day that obviously he had not meant by this that all Muslims engage in such practices, any more than saying ‘Americans make good films’ means that all Americans make good films; in vain did he adduce copious evidence of concern — including from Muslim victims themselves — about the amount of sexual and ‘honour’ violence, including rape and incest, within Muslim families. None of this made any difference. Hedegaard is about to be burned at the Danish legal stake for his heresy. …

As far as I can see, these developments in Denmark have been totally ignored in the English-speaking media. So much for the liberals’ fetish of free speech — so noisily defended whenever Christianity [MP’s one blind spot, in our view, is her defense of religion- JB], America, Israel or the west are being demonised and libelled; so much for the feminists’ professed concern for the rights of women and the obscenity of rape and sexual abuse. Two men who actually stand up for these principles are being persecuted for doing so, while the so-called progressive world is either helping pile up the faggots for their fire or looking the other way.

It’s not just Hedegaard or Langballe who are being consumed by these flames, however, but Europe’s own freedom.

We  believe that the Framers of the United States Constitution intended to found a secular nation, not “a Christian nation” as so many conservative pundits assert. We have looked for informed opinion about it, and found this one, given to us by Tom Hinkson, who is “a  life-long atheist”. He was, he says, “not brought up with any religion”, though both his parents “believe in a Christian deity”. He served his country in the Navy as a Nuclear Reactor Operator for seven years. In the last election cycle he joined the campaign for Marco Rubio. He is a  life member of both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

Here is his opinion. It is his and not ours, but the information he provides confirms our own.

2011 is supposed to be the year of the Constitutional Conservative, but is it really? The Tea Party has helped  the Republican Party gain a majority in the House of Representatives, and near parity in the Senate, so things in the US have to get better – right? Not so fast! It seems that we as a nation have traded one evil for a possibly lesser evil, but another evil nonetheless. Have you noticed who is at the helm of the Tea Party? Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich … the list goes on. You might ask, “Well aren’t they better than Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden?” The answer is yes, of course they are. But too many of the Tea Party figureheads represent that “silent majority” of biblical literalist Christians who, instead of wanting to turn the United States into a socialist utopia as Obama and the Democrats do, want to turn it into a kind of theocracy.

Since the rise of the Tea Party, there has been a movement to re-learn our American history, mainly fueled by Glenn Beck. This would be a very good thing, if he told the whole story. History is usually told with huge gaps to reinforce the tellers’ point of view. The so-called Christian conservatives bend history one way, and the Progressives would rather ignore history altogether.

If you have watched Glenn Beck for any appreciable length of time, you have seen him bring several people on to argue that we are a Christian nation, that nearly everything in the Constitution has a biblical foundation, and the proof for these claims lies in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. He and they make a compelling argument – at least to those who don’t know history.

It is true that the preamble of the Declaration of Independence refers to a divine power:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The  Constitution, however, created a very explicitly secular government, and those that would argue otherwise try to re-write history to hide the transition from a government that derives its power from a higher power to one that derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Glenn Beck and the “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence founded our nation, and that the Constitution was written with the Declaration as sort of a foundation. The question is, are they right? Let’s look at some history that they won’t tell us.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, formally declaring the independence of the 13 colonies from Great Britain, but did it create the United States of America? The answer is no, the United States of America was created by the Articles of Confederation, which created a binding agreement of government between the 13 original colonies. The Articles of Confederation were not ratified until March, 1781. Until the Articles of Confederation were ratified, the United States of America was just an idea. But wait a minute, why doesn’t anyone mention the Articles of Confederation? Probably because the Articles of Confederation created a government that failed in short order. The Constitution that we have today was originally ratified on September 17th, 1787, creating our current form of government.

The “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written virtually side-by-side; in fact they are frequently published this way. The question is why would they want to ignore the 11-year gap? The answer is that the Constitution is a secular document. But, if we can be convinced that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written side-by-side, then an argument can be made to declare the United States of America a “Christian nation”, which opens the door for a biblical lens to view the Constitution through; even though the separation of church and state is an undeniable concept that is spelled out in the Constitution, and further explained by Thomas Jefferson in his letters to two separate Baptist organizations (see here and here).

Christians will argue that the intent of the founders was to create a Christian nation because Christianity was (and still is) the major religion present in the United States. But, if that was their intent, why not spell it out? Why would the founders specifically state that there will be “no religious test for office” (Article 6, paragraph 3 of the Constitution), or that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (1st Amendment)? The answer is obvious: the founders wanted to create a secular government. Not only did they not state that there was a federal religion, they specifically banned it! In fact they went even further than that, and banned congress from making any law that RESPECTED the establishment of a religion, meaning that not only would the government not create a religion, or declare a national religion, but that the government would not even formally recognize religions.

Of course, the secular argument has a few problems: for instance, it is traditional for congress to open with a prayer, which would seem to contradict the Constitution itself, and honestly, it does. So, how can this be explained? Hypocrisy, plain and simple. If there is one constant in the history of this nation, then hypocrisy is it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both outspoken critics of slavery, yet both owned dozens of slaves. No one today will argue in favor of slavery, even though several of the founders owned them. Yet, there are many who would argue for legislation based upon the bible or other religious texts rather than the Constitution simply because most of our founders identified themselves as Christians.

In the Declaration of Independence, there are three mentions of a higher power, they are: “Nature’s God”, “Creator”, and “Divine Providence”. None of these three terms are innately Christian, and the use of the terms is as an authority to separate from Great Britain. The United States of America is mentioned at the end of the document, but as I stated earlier, this was an idea; the United States of America was not formally established until the Articles of Confederation were ratified. Independence from Great Britain, and thus international recognition as a nation was not achieved until the end of the Revolutionary War by the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3rd, 1783.

In the Articles of Confederation, there are three references to a deity. Two of those references are “in the Year of Our Lord”, which was the common language for stating a date, not a reference to any divine inspiration for the government being created. The third reference is found in Article 13, the first sentence of the second paragraph states: “And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of confederation and perpetual union.” “Great Governor of the World” is an obvious allusion to a higher power, but not specifically to a Christian deity.

Nonetheless, the “Great Governor of the World” is the authority that is used to create the government under the Articles of Confederation. So if  the United States of America were still governed by the Articles of Confederation, the Christians would have some proof that we were founded as a “Christian Nation”. But as The Articles of Confederation created a very weak and very flawed government which soon failed, it can be stated that the government formed as a direct result of the Declaration of Independence was a failure. The founders of our current government knew that several changes needed to be made.

Within the Constitution, there is only one reference to any higher power, and that reference is in the date, which as stated above, was the common way of declaring a date “in the Year of Our Lord”. That reference is at the end of the Constitution, just before the signatures. There are several very important differences between the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation.

The first, and largest difference, is that the Constitution does not claim any authority from a higher power, whereas both the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation did. Instead, the Constitution boldly proclaims “We the People” as the authority to create the government and all that comes with it. This runs in direct contradiction to the “Christian Conservative” claim that our rights are not given to us by the government, but by the Christian God (which was not specifically mentioned in any founding document). This puts a large hole in the “Christian Conservative” argument, but the Constitution does not stop there.

Within the Constitution, there are three specific bans on the co-mingling of religion and government. These bans are found in Article 6, paragraph 3, and in the 1st Amendment. The Constitution clearly states that there shall be “no religious test for office”, at either the federal or state levels, and that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This suggests very strongly that one of the many lessons that the founders learned from the Articles of Confederation was that the mixing of religion and government does not work.

So while in principle I agree with “restoring America” as the Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck advocate, I say let’s restore it to a government run by the laws set forth by the Constitution. While we’re at it, let’s restore the Pledge of Allegiance to how it was before 1954, when the words “under God” were added. We can also take the words “In God We Trust” off of our currency. Those words were added first to coinage in 1864, on the two-cent coin, long after the founders died. Paper money wasn’t tainted with those words until 1957. Our national motto “In God We Trust” wasn’t adopted until 1956. All of the laws ordering these changes are unconstitutional because they all respect the establishment of religion. Let us abide by the Constitution, and restore the secular nation that the Founders intended.

“Let us arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time” – as Churchill said (more or less) when Chamberlain sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for a worthless promise of peace.

Now it is the freedom of the internet that is under threat, not only by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but – even worse – by Islam.

Pamela Geller – she who alerted America to the Ground Zero mosque plan – writes at the American Thinker:

Late last September, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns internet domain names, approved a huge change in the way it operates. Europe and North America will now have five seats on its Board of Directors, instead of ten, and a new “Arab States” region will have five seats as well. …

This has been a long time coming.

Back in October 2009 … ICANN ended its agreement with the U.S. government. …

The new agreement gave other countries (including dictatorships and rogue nations) and the U.N. the ability to set internet use policies. …

The ICANN action in September gave the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and other unfriendly nations a prominent internet role — something they never could get during the administration of George W. Bush. …

The OIC is the main engine of the stealth jihad against the West. See our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010 for its role in the quiet conquest of Europe by Islam, now well under way. (And see also The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010, which is about the appointment by President Obama of a Muslim terrorist sympathizer as a US representative to that nefarious organization.)

In practice, the new arrangement makes it much easier for Muslim countries to dictate what stays on the internet and what doesn’t… Anti-jihad sites like … AtlasShrugs.com and the JihadWatch.org site … will likely lose their domain names. It will become harder and harder to find the truth about jihad activity, or any resistance to it, on the internet or anywhere else. …

The new “net neutrality” rules approved last week by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will just make that easier as well… [by taking] the operation of the Internet away from the heterogeneous and diversified interests of the private sector that has created it and [concentrating] it in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable board of political appointees atop a federal bureaucracy. …

James G. Lakely, the co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy for the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank … charged that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, an Obama crony, wants to “claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation.”  … [in]  an attempt to limit the freedom of internet users by subjecting what [has] always been a free-market give-and-take to government regulation. In short, the FCC would control how all information reached personal computers.

An internet censored by Muslim ideologues and controlled by the feds. Do you see your freedom of speech slipping away?

We see all our freedom slipping away. Obama is not even selling but gifting America to Islam.

Has there ever been a religious idea that did more good than harm?

Most religious ideas – that is to say, ideas about gods and how mortals should relate to them – have not been beneficial. For the greater part of history, religions required the sacrifice of human life. Deities were conceived of as cruel and destructive unless propitiated with human blood.

Exceptional and utterly different was the Mosaic idea of God-sanctioned Law that required people to deal justly with each other: the idea that a god of justice, a single abstract omnipotent god, commanded them to obey the Law.

The historical importance of the idea does not lie in its notion of a god who holds the scales of justice and can punish or reward, but in the setting of law above human authority and power; the keeping of it out of the hands of chieftains, kings, and tyrants, safe from whim, passion, folly, impulse and madness.

The doctrine that the Law was handed down by a single abstract just and omnipotent God, made it awful in the original sense of the word. Justice itself was sanctified. To obey the Law was to fear God. To obey the Law was all that God required of His people.

It was the Law itself that mattered, because justice mattered above everything. God mattered because justice mattered, not the other way about. To ensure justice was what He was for. The worship of God was the worship of justice.

By bestowing equal obligations on everyone to deal justly – or “righteously” – each with the other, the Law, eternal and unalterable, could be an impregnable house in which everyone could safely dwell. In the certainty of its protection, everyone was free to pursue his chosen path, to go about his personal affairs without fear.

It’s not important who wrote the laws. It’s irrelevant whether or not the idea was in actuality conceived by a man named Moses. But we can conjecture about its provenance. Perhaps the idea of the single, abstract, just, omnipotent God, which tradition associates with a man or a tribe called Abraham, really did arise as legend has it long before the laws were written. This God, uniquely, did not require human sacrifice: a lesson enshrined in the story that He ordered “Abraham” not to sacrifice his son to Him. But nobody knows when the story was first told. It may have been about the same time as the laws were inscribed, and nobody knows when that was either.

If a man called Moses did give some laws to a people who believed in such a God, he certainly did not write all the laws attributed to him. They were manifestly the work of many minds over a length of time.

Who might Moses have been? Probably, as Sigmund Freud speculates in Moses and Monotheism, he was a prince of Egypt.  (The legend of his having been sent floating on a stream by a Hebrew mother and fished out by a royal princess who then adopted him was transparently invented in retrospect to make him a true son of the people whose leader he became.)

So perhaps Egypt was the source of the great religious idea. But it remained the property of the Hebrews alone for centuries.

Other nations have held law itself to be above the ruling power – as did the Greeks in their city-states, and the English in the Middle Ages when Magna Carta affirmed the same principle. But it is the core and substance of only one religion.

When the nation whose religion it was became a part of Alexander’s vast empire, the idea spread, as ideas do when frontiers open and people travel and settle in foreign lands. But as ideas do when they disperse, it was reinterpreted, misunderstood, adjusted, complicated, simplified, emptied, augmented, adapted to satisfy changing political expedients. The new religion of Christianity, though it adopted the scriptures of the Jews (after some hesitation), dethroned Justice and set Love in its place. The unique and abstract God of Justice was superseded by a triune godhead of which one hypostasis was incarnated in human form in historical time. And the belief that deity required human sacrifice was revived. The great idea was despised, and even, by some heterodox Christian sects, abominated. Christianity was not a development of Judaism but a revolution against it.

Yet the idea lay in the baggage of Christianity wherever it traveled.

It was brought out into the light of day by the Founders of the United States, who expressed it in The Declaration of Independence when they wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …”; and it was perceptibly in their minds when they composed the Constitution which, though it does not mention God, was meant to provide the shelter of law for lasting liberty.

It is not necessary now to believe in the existence of a divine power presiding over human affairs, to understand and appreciate the idea. (And it is certainly not necessary to find every individual Mosaic law admirable. Indeed, to modern minds many of them are ridiculous. The actual 613 laws of Judaism, and all its ritual requirements, can be disregarded without the idea itself being in the least devalued.)

We do not now need a transcendent authority to keep us obeying the law and behaving towards each other with moral decency. We can choose to do so for sound reasons.

But the idea that an essential framework of law, informed by moral principles, should be conserved beyond the reach of transient governing powers, remains good: so good that it will not spoil if some uphold it in the name of God.

*

Postscript: This essay should not be taken as an argument in vindication of Judaism. The Jewish God is also a Creator God, believed to have brought the material universe into existence ex nihilo. (The ancient Greeks did not entertain that absurdity: they believed that matter had always existed, and was shaped into the form it has by divine craftsmanship.) Such a god, answering a need for explanation in ages past, is no longer useful.

But viewed historically, the idea of an abstract God put to use as a transcendent authority for law and justice, can be seen as a foreshadowing of the anthropocentric, as opposed to deocentric, evaluation of human worth that the Renaissance proposed and the Enlightenment realized: an intellectual stepping-stone by which mankind advanced from superstitious dread of divine wrath to a rational, secular, appreciation of law-protected liberty.

Jillian Becker    November 1, 2010

Trying to make a living? You’ll need a permit.

You’ll need a pile of permits.

Socialist governments, aspiring to  control everybody’s life from cradle to grave, start by regulating everything you do. Regulation starts with licensing.

Mark Steyn tells this story and comments on it:

With its uncanny ability to prioritize, California, land of Golden Statism for unionized bureaucrats, is cracking down on complimentary coffee. From The Ventura County Star:

Ty Brann likes the neighborly feel of his local hardware store. The fourth-generation Ventura County resident and small business owner has been going to the B & B Do It Center on Mobile Avenue in Camarillo for many years. … So when he learned the county had told B & B it could no longer put out its usual box of doughnuts and coffee pot for the morning customers, Brann was taken aback.

Dunno why. He lives in California. He surely knows by now everything you enjoy is either illegal or regulated up the wazoo. The Collins family had been putting a coffee pot on the counter for 15 years, as the previous owners of the store had done, too, and yea, back through all the generations. But in California that’s an illegal act. The permit mullahs told Randy Collins that he needed to install stainless steel sinks with hot and cold water and a prep kitchen to handle the doughnuts. “What some establishments do is hire a mobile food preparation services or in some cases a coffee service,” explained Elizabeth Huff, “Manager of Community Services” (yeah, right). “Those establishments have permits and can operate in front of or even inside of the stores.”

Even inside? Gee, that’s big of you. “Those establishments have permits”? In California, what doesn’t? Commissar Huff added that there are a range of permits of varying costs. No doubt a plain instant coffee permit would be relatively simple, but if you wished to offer a decaf caramel macchiato with complimentary biscotti additional licenses may be required.

“We’re certainly working with the health department,” said Mr Collins. “We want to be in compliance with the law.”

Why?

When the law says that it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. What the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? George III didn’t care what complimentary liquid refreshments a village blacksmith shared with his clientele. Say what you like about the Boston Tea Party, but nobody attempted to prosecute them for unlicensed handling of beverage items in a public place.

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services – all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

And from the Heritage Foundation comes a video about this economy-depressing form of tyranny: