"Right of Conscience" Rule Shields Healthcare Workers
The Bush administration yesterday granted sweeping new protections to health workers who refuse to provide care that violates their personal beliefs, setting off an intense battle over opponents' plans to try to repeal the measure. The far-reaching regulation cuts off federal funding for any state or local government, hospital, health plan, clinic or other entity that does not accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other employees who refuse to participate in care they find ethically, morally or religiously objectionable. While primarily aimed at doctors and nurses, it offers protection to anyone with a "reasonable" connection to objectionable care—including ultrasound technicians, nurses aides, secretaries and even janitors who might have to clean equipment used in procedures they deem objectionable. The "right of conscience" rule could become one of the first contentious tests for the Obama administration, which could seek to reverse the rule either by initiating a lengthy new rulemaking process or by supporting legislation already pending in Congress. The rule comes at a time of increasingly frequent reports of conflicts between health-care workers and patients; pharmacists have turned away women seeking birth control and morning-after emergency contraception pills, fertility doctors have refused to help unmarried women and lesbians conceive by artificial insemination, and Catholic hospitals have refused to provide the morning-after pill and to perform abortions and sterilizations. Experts predict the issue could escalate sharply if a broad array of therapies becomes available using embryonic stem cells, which are controversial because they are obtained by destroying very early embryos. The rule, which will cost more than $44 million to implement, gives more than 584,000 health-care organizations until Oct. 1 to provide written certification of their compliance.
12/24/08
12/19/08
12/14/08
Stem cells
Researchers at Harvard University, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine have found a way to create healthy stem cells from adult cells--no embryo required--using an adenovirus. The adenovirus can make the transfer in mouse cells without permanently integrating itself. The resulting induced pluripotent...
http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=9463&m=44049
http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=9463&m=44049
12/3/08
12/1/08
Corruption corruption and more Corruption
Ask just about any public interest advocate concerned about the dismal state of media and journalism, and they will tell you that Obama's media policy platform is excellent: the beginning of what could be the most public interest friendly administration in presidential history. Part of this optimism stems from Obama's understanding that Internet and technology are the cornerstone of a 21st century economy and society. Another part comes from the competence and integrity of the media and telecom advisors working on his transition team. And another comes from his direct experience.
Obama-the-candidate commented several times that voters' false views of him -- that he's a Muslim, a socialist and unpatriotic -- were fed and spread by Fox News and their cohorts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham in the far-right media. Obama understands that they are the special sauce in Karl Rove's toxic recipe to discredit progressive policies and politicians, and divide Americans with wedge issues.
And Obama understands that pushing back against guys like Limbaugh - who this week blamed the president-elect for the financial crisis, calling it "Obama's recession" - requires a bold policy agenda that uses the Internet to pry media distribution monopolies away from the largest media companies. Though often underreported, Obama spoke frequently about his commitment to blocking further media consolidation, fostering more independent and diverse media, ensuring universal high-speed Internet access, and "taking a back seat to no one" in passing "Net Neutrality" laws to prevent Internet providers like Comcast and AT&T from creating fast and slow lanes on the Internet. (click here for a look at Obama's important media reform pledges during his campaign).
The Washington Post ombudsman and others claim that the media was too kind to Obama and hard on John McCain. This superficial analysis is both wrong and misleading. Wrong because you had a candidate that was forcefully embracing the policies of George W. Bush while the nation spiraled into one of its darkest moments in its history. The idea that the press should not exert sharp criticism of such a candidate reflects the kind of tepid pandering that has become the hallmark of mainstream corporate media.
And misleading because the real problem is not the media favoring one candidate over another, but rather its utter failure to practice critical journalism. Turn on your television or radio, and it's 24/7 horserace political coverage, partisan shouting matches, and salacious crap. There is no effort to tell voters the difference between the candidates' rhetoric and reality, how their proclamations match their voting records, and what their policy proposals would actually do. While there were a few notable moments when news outlets actually did this during the campaign, they were few and far between.
Olbermann and Maddow's increased popularity is moving the range of debate on cable from center-right to left-right, but radio is still overwhelmingly right-wing, and the changes at MSNBC fall far short of a comprehensive, long-term solution to thecrisis of journalism. Newsroom layoffs mount across television, radio and newspapers, and omission has become the greatest threat. There is virtually no in-depth coverage and analysis on television of Iraq and Afghanistan, poverty, the environment and the other critical issues facing working Americans. And despite the explosion of the Internet, 45% of American homes still have no high speed Internet, while some 65% of Americans still cite TV as their primary news source.
Charges of liberal bias continue to strike such fear in the hearts of corporate news editors and producers, that they continue obsessive contortions to present both sides of every debate -- not from a factual perspective, but from a partisan one. Even if one side of an argument is clearly true, today's Wolf Blitzer, Charlie Gibson or Brian Williams - and even NPR and PBS - dare not say it (such as the economic bailout being a corrupt boondoggle for banking fatcats) and suffer the wrath of the right wing noise machine, and pressure from their corporate bosses. In today's media environment, the truth becomes irrelevant.
Take a walk through rural Ohio as I did this Election Day, and working-class voters are watching Fox, reading empty newspapers running on a bare-bones staff, and listening to radio's right-wing hate-fest. In today's media environment, we must face the fact that if not for the financial crisis and a disastrous GOP vice-presidential pick, this election might well have been McCain's.
So the incoming president is excellent on media policy, and his election allows media reform advocates to move from defense to offense. However, as Obama inherits a severe economic crisis, two wars, and myriad other problems, it will be too easy for media issues to get pushed down the to-do list. And the well-financed lobbyists from the phone, cable and broadcasting companies who supported Obama's candidacy are expecting a return on their investment. As well they should: if you look back at the history of Democratic presidents and media policy, there have been many disappointments, and cause for us to be as cautious as we are optimistic.
Here's a quick list of the top policy reforms to watch in 2009 for anyone who shares my disgust with news coverage, sky-high cable and phone bills, and the other maladies brought by a media system dominated by the likes of Comcast, Disney, AT&T, General Electric, Verizon, News Corporation and Time Warner:
Obama-the-candidate commented several times that voters' false views of him -- that he's a Muslim, a socialist and unpatriotic -- were fed and spread by Fox News and their cohorts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham in the far-right media. Obama understands that they are the special sauce in Karl Rove's toxic recipe to discredit progressive policies and politicians, and divide Americans with wedge issues.
And Obama understands that pushing back against guys like Limbaugh - who this week blamed the president-elect for the financial crisis, calling it "Obama's recession" - requires a bold policy agenda that uses the Internet to pry media distribution monopolies away from the largest media companies. Though often underreported, Obama spoke frequently about his commitment to blocking further media consolidation, fostering more independent and diverse media, ensuring universal high-speed Internet access, and "taking a back seat to no one" in passing "Net Neutrality" laws to prevent Internet providers like Comcast and AT&T from creating fast and slow lanes on the Internet. (click here for a look at Obama's important media reform pledges during his campaign).
The Washington Post ombudsman and others claim that the media was too kind to Obama and hard on John McCain. This superficial analysis is both wrong and misleading. Wrong because you had a candidate that was forcefully embracing the policies of George W. Bush while the nation spiraled into one of its darkest moments in its history. The idea that the press should not exert sharp criticism of such a candidate reflects the kind of tepid pandering that has become the hallmark of mainstream corporate media.
And misleading because the real problem is not the media favoring one candidate over another, but rather its utter failure to practice critical journalism. Turn on your television or radio, and it's 24/7 horserace political coverage, partisan shouting matches, and salacious crap. There is no effort to tell voters the difference between the candidates' rhetoric and reality, how their proclamations match their voting records, and what their policy proposals would actually do. While there were a few notable moments when news outlets actually did this during the campaign, they were few and far between.
Olbermann and Maddow's increased popularity is moving the range of debate on cable from center-right to left-right, but radio is still overwhelmingly right-wing, and the changes at MSNBC fall far short of a comprehensive, long-term solution to thecrisis of journalism. Newsroom layoffs mount across television, radio and newspapers, and omission has become the greatest threat. There is virtually no in-depth coverage and analysis on television of Iraq and Afghanistan, poverty, the environment and the other critical issues facing working Americans. And despite the explosion of the Internet, 45% of American homes still have no high speed Internet, while some 65% of Americans still cite TV as their primary news source.
Charges of liberal bias continue to strike such fear in the hearts of corporate news editors and producers, that they continue obsessive contortions to present both sides of every debate -- not from a factual perspective, but from a partisan one. Even if one side of an argument is clearly true, today's Wolf Blitzer, Charlie Gibson or Brian Williams - and even NPR and PBS - dare not say it (such as the economic bailout being a corrupt boondoggle for banking fatcats) and suffer the wrath of the right wing noise machine, and pressure from their corporate bosses. In today's media environment, the truth becomes irrelevant.
Take a walk through rural Ohio as I did this Election Day, and working-class voters are watching Fox, reading empty newspapers running on a bare-bones staff, and listening to radio's right-wing hate-fest. In today's media environment, we must face the fact that if not for the financial crisis and a disastrous GOP vice-presidential pick, this election might well have been McCain's.
So the incoming president is excellent on media policy, and his election allows media reform advocates to move from defense to offense. However, as Obama inherits a severe economic crisis, two wars, and myriad other problems, it will be too easy for media issues to get pushed down the to-do list. And the well-financed lobbyists from the phone, cable and broadcasting companies who supported Obama's candidacy are expecting a return on their investment. As well they should: if you look back at the history of Democratic presidents and media policy, there have been many disappointments, and cause for us to be as cautious as we are optimistic.
Here's a quick list of the top policy reforms to watch in 2009 for anyone who shares my disgust with news coverage, sky-high cable and phone bills, and the other maladies brought by a media system dominated by the likes of Comcast, Disney, AT&T, General Electric, Verizon, News Corporation and Time Warner:
11/30/08
11/27/08
11/15/08
History misused
Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation" metaphor allowed the Supreme Court to redefine church-state law and policy—and not necessarily in a good way.
Gentle Reader,
Last time, I told the story of how the bitterly contested election of 1800 brought the question of religion's place in civic life to the forefront and provided the backdrop to Jefferson's phrase "a wall of separation between Church & State." This week he raises the provocative question: Was Jefferson correct to say the First Amendment built a "wall of separation"? Or does the modern Court's use of this famous metaphor actually distort our understanding of the First Amendment?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Many Americans believe that these 16 words from the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment built a "wall of separation" between church and state. The media, academics, and even the U.S. Supreme Court frequently reinforce this notion.
Does the Constitution, in fact, erect a "wall of separation"? More important, does it matter that this wall has become so influential in American law and policy?
On New Year's Day, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, endorsing the persecuted Baptists' aspirations for religious liberty. The First Amendment, he wrote, denied Congress the authority to establish a religion or prohibit its free exercise, "thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."
In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court "rediscovered" Jefferson's metaphor: "In the words of Jefferson," the justices declared, the First Amendment "erect[ed] 'a wall of separation between church and State' … [that] must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach." This landmark ruling in Everson v. Board of Education had enormous repercussions for the role of religion in public life. The Court, it would seem, sought to legitimate its decision in this case by appealing to a giant figure in American history. The Jeffersonian metaphor may be the Court's most celebrated use of history in contemporary jurisprudence. It is, in fact, a misuse of history because Jefferson's "wall" misrepresents constitutional principles in several important ways.
First, Jefferson's metaphor emphasizes separation between church and state—unlike the First Amendment, which speaks in terms of the non-establishment and free exercise of religion. Jefferson's Baptist correspondents, who agitated for disestablishment (the elimination of an official "state church") but not for separation, were apparently discomfited by the figurative phrase. They, like many Americans, feared that the erection of a wall would separate religious influences from public life and policy. Few evangelical dissenters challenged the widespread assumption of the age that a self-governing people must be a moral people and that morals can be nurtured only by the Christian religion. They believed religion was an indispensable support for civic virtue and political prosperity, and its separation from public life necessarily imperiled social order and stability.
Second, a wall is a bilateral barrier that inhibits the activities of both the civil government and religion—unlike the First Amendment, which imposes restrictions on civil government only. Replacing the First Amendment with a wall unavoidably restrains religion, especially in its ability to influence public life, thereby exceeding the limitations imposed by the Constitution.
Third, having assumed the separation of church and state, the civil state (often acting through the judiciary) has then presumed to define what is "religion" and what are the appropriate realms, duties, and functions of the "church" in a civil society. This has given the civil state practical, de facto priority over the church, subjecting the latter to the jurisdiction of the former.
Originally a restriction on the civil government's powers, the First Amendment has been reinterpreted to grant power to the government to define and, ultimately, restrict the place of religion in society. Herein lies the danger of this metaphor. Today people frequently invoke the "wall" to separate religion from public life, thereby promoting a religion that is essentially private and a civil state that is strictly secular.
The "high and impregnable" wall constructed by the modern Court inhibits religion's ability to inform the public ethic, deprives religious citizens of the civil liberty to participate in politics armed with ideas informed by their spiritual values, and infringes the right of religious communities and institutions to extend their prophetic ministries into the public square. Jefferson's figurative barrier has been used to silence the religious voice in the marketplace of ideas and to segregate faith communities behind a restrictive wall.
Those who criticize modern constructions of the wall are not necessarily supporting a religious establishment. Rather, these critics contend that the First Amendment requires that religion and religious perspectives must be allowed to compete in the public sphere, without government inhibition, on the same terms as their secular counterparts. By its very nature, however, a high wall does not permit this.
The use of Jefferson's metaphoric wall to exclude religion from public life is at war with our cultural traditions insofar as it shows a callous indifference toward religion. It also offends basic notions of freedom of religious exercise, expression, and association in a pluralistic society. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's "high and impregnable" wall has redefined First Amendment principles, transforming a bulwark of religious liberty into an instrument of intolerance and censorship.
Gentle Reader,
Last time, I told the story of how the bitterly contested election of 1800 brought the question of religion's place in civic life to the forefront and provided the backdrop to Jefferson's phrase "a wall of separation between Church & State." This week he raises the provocative question: Was Jefferson correct to say the First Amendment built a "wall of separation"? Or does the modern Court's use of this famous metaphor actually distort our understanding of the First Amendment?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Many Americans believe that these 16 words from the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment built a "wall of separation" between church and state. The media, academics, and even the U.S. Supreme Court frequently reinforce this notion.
Does the Constitution, in fact, erect a "wall of separation"? More important, does it matter that this wall has become so influential in American law and policy?
On New Year's Day, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, endorsing the persecuted Baptists' aspirations for religious liberty. The First Amendment, he wrote, denied Congress the authority to establish a religion or prohibit its free exercise, "thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."
In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court "rediscovered" Jefferson's metaphor: "In the words of Jefferson," the justices declared, the First Amendment "erect[ed] 'a wall of separation between church and State' … [that] must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach." This landmark ruling in Everson v. Board of Education had enormous repercussions for the role of religion in public life. The Court, it would seem, sought to legitimate its decision in this case by appealing to a giant figure in American history. The Jeffersonian metaphor may be the Court's most celebrated use of history in contemporary jurisprudence. It is, in fact, a misuse of history because Jefferson's "wall" misrepresents constitutional principles in several important ways.
First, Jefferson's metaphor emphasizes separation between church and state—unlike the First Amendment, which speaks in terms of the non-establishment and free exercise of religion. Jefferson's Baptist correspondents, who agitated for disestablishment (the elimination of an official "state church") but not for separation, were apparently discomfited by the figurative phrase. They, like many Americans, feared that the erection of a wall would separate religious influences from public life and policy. Few evangelical dissenters challenged the widespread assumption of the age that a self-governing people must be a moral people and that morals can be nurtured only by the Christian religion. They believed religion was an indispensable support for civic virtue and political prosperity, and its separation from public life necessarily imperiled social order and stability.
Second, a wall is a bilateral barrier that inhibits the activities of both the civil government and religion—unlike the First Amendment, which imposes restrictions on civil government only. Replacing the First Amendment with a wall unavoidably restrains religion, especially in its ability to influence public life, thereby exceeding the limitations imposed by the Constitution.
Third, having assumed the separation of church and state, the civil state (often acting through the judiciary) has then presumed to define what is "religion" and what are the appropriate realms, duties, and functions of the "church" in a civil society. This has given the civil state practical, de facto priority over the church, subjecting the latter to the jurisdiction of the former.
Originally a restriction on the civil government's powers, the First Amendment has been reinterpreted to grant power to the government to define and, ultimately, restrict the place of religion in society. Herein lies the danger of this metaphor. Today people frequently invoke the "wall" to separate religion from public life, thereby promoting a religion that is essentially private and a civil state that is strictly secular.
The "high and impregnable" wall constructed by the modern Court inhibits religion's ability to inform the public ethic, deprives religious citizens of the civil liberty to participate in politics armed with ideas informed by their spiritual values, and infringes the right of religious communities and institutions to extend their prophetic ministries into the public square. Jefferson's figurative barrier has been used to silence the religious voice in the marketplace of ideas and to segregate faith communities behind a restrictive wall.
Those who criticize modern constructions of the wall are not necessarily supporting a religious establishment. Rather, these critics contend that the First Amendment requires that religion and religious perspectives must be allowed to compete in the public sphere, without government inhibition, on the same terms as their secular counterparts. By its very nature, however, a high wall does not permit this.
The use of Jefferson's metaphoric wall to exclude religion from public life is at war with our cultural traditions insofar as it shows a callous indifference toward religion. It also offends basic notions of freedom of religious exercise, expression, and association in a pluralistic society. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's "high and impregnable" wall has redefined First Amendment principles, transforming a bulwark of religious liberty into an instrument of intolerance and censorship.
The Wall of Separation
The rancorous presidential election of 1800 brought religion to the forefront of public debate and had lasting repercussions for the relationship between church and state.
Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated the third president of the United States on March 4, 1801, following one of the most bitterly contested presidential elections in American history. He had faced the unpopular incumbent, Federalist John Adams of Massachusetts—his confrere in the independence struggle and longtime rival. The electorate was deeply divided along regional, partisan, and ideological lines. Acrimonious campaign rhetoric punctuated the polarized political landscape.
In few, if any, presidential contests has religion played a more divisive and decisive role than in the election of 1800. Jefferson's religion, or alleged lack thereof, emerged as a critical issue in the campaign. His Federalist opponents vilified him as a Jacobin and atheist. (Both charges stemmed from his notorious sympathy for the French Revolution, which in the 1790s had turned bloody and, some said, anti-Christian.) In the days before the election, the Gazette of the United States, a leading Federalist newspaper, posed the "grand question" of whether Americans should vote for "GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT [John Adams]; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!"
Jefferson's Federalist foes did not invent the stinging accusation that he was an infidel. Years before, his ardent advocacy for disestablishment in Virginia had led many pious Americans to conclude that Jefferson was, if not an enemy of religion, at least indifferent towards organized religion's vital role in civic life. The publication of his Notes on the State of Virginia in the mid-1780s exacerbated these fears. He wrote, "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." This passage came back to haunt him in the 1800 campaign. Detractors said this proved he was an infidel or, worse, an atheist.
Jefferson described himself as "a real Christian," although he was certainly aware that his beliefs were unconventional. "I am of a sect by myself," he said. He believed that human reason was the arbiter of religious truth and rejected key tenets of orthodox Christianity, including the Bible's divine origins, the deity of Christ, original sin, and the miraculous accounts in Scripture.
Despite his deviations from orthodoxy, he rejected suggestions that his views were of "that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions." His religion was very different, Jefferson conceded, from the leading churchmen of his day who called him an "infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel." He believed that Jesus Christ's moral teachings, stripped of the fiction and artifice carefully crafted by those calling themselves Christians, were "the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man."
An infidel in office?
Jefferson's faith provided an early test of religion's place in national politics. His heterodox beliefs raised doubts about his fitness for high office. In 1798, Timothy Dwight, a Congregationalist minister and the president of Yale College, warned that the election of Jeffersonian Republicans might usher in a Jacobin regime in which "we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire, the vessels of the sacramental supper borne by an ass in public procession, and our children … chanting mockeries against God … [to] the ruin of their religion, and the loss of their souls."
In an influential pamphlet published in 1800, William Linn, a Dutch Reformed clergyman, warned that a vote for Jefferson "must be construed into no less than rebellion against God." He added ominously that the promotion of an infidel to high office would encourage public immorality and lead to the "destruction of all social order and happiness."
Presbyterian minister John Mitchell Mason similarly declaimed that it would be "a crime never to be forgiven" for the American people to confer the office of chief magistrate "upon an open enemy to their religion, their Redeemer, and their hope, [and it] would be mischief to themselves and sin against God." Jefferson's "favorite wish," Mitchell charged, is "to see a government administered without any religious principle among either rulers or ruled." He repudiated the notion gaining currency among Jeffersonians that "Religion has nothing to do with politics."
Jeffersonian partisans denied that their candidate was an atheist and advanced a separationist policy that would eventually exert much influence on American politics. "Religion and government are equally necessary," said Tunis Wortman, "but their interests should be kept separate and distinct. No legitimate connection can ever subsist between them. Upon no plan, no system, can they become united, without endangering the purity and usefulness of both—the church will corrupt the state, and the state pollute the church."
Republicans extolled Jefferson as a leader of uncommon liberality and tolerance—an enlightened man who zealously defended constitutional government, civil and religious liberty, and the separation between religion and politics. "[M]y information is that he is a sincere professor of Christianity—though not a noisy one," Wortman wrote.
The campaign rhetoric was so vitriolic that when news of Jefferson's election swept across the country, housewives in Federalist New England were seen burying their family Bibles in their gardens or hiding them in wells because they expected the Scriptures to be confiscated and burned by the new administration.
Anybody but a Presbyterian!
Although Jefferson's beliefs drew the most attention, John Adams was not immune from political smears on account of religion. When President Adams recommended a national "day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer" in March 1799, political adversaries depicted him as a tool of establishmentarians intent on legally uniting a specific church with the new federal government. This allegation alarmed religious dissenters, such as the Baptists, who feared persecution by a state church.
"A general suspicion prevailed," Adams recounted a decade later, "that the Presbyterian Church [which was presumed to be behind the national day of prayer] was ambitious and aimed at an establishment as a national church." Although disclaiming any involvement in such a scheme, Adams ruefully reported that he "was represented as a Presbyterian and at the head of this political and ecclesiastical project. The secret whisper ran through all the sects, 'Let us have Jefferson, Madison, Burr, anybody, whether they be philosophers, Deists, or even atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President.'" Adams thought the controversy, which drove dissenters into Jefferson's camp, cost him the election.
Both men were deeply wounded by the vicious attacks on their characters and the ruinous campaign tactics. An anguished Jefferson compared his persecution at the hands of critics—especially among the New England clergy—with the crucified Christ: "from the clergy I expect no mercy. They crucified their Saviour, who preached that their kingdom was not of this world; and all who practice on that precept must expect the extreme of their wrath. The laws of the present day withhold their hands from blood; but lies and slander still remain to them."
The bitterness lingered long after both men had left public office. In their declining years, they resumed a correspondence, slowly repairing their ruptured friendship.
Church and state
Jefferson enjoyed one pocket of support in staunchly Federalist New England: the Baptists. In October 1801, the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, wrote to congratulate the recently inaugurated president. The Danbury Baptists were a beleaguered religious minority in a state where Congregationalism was the established church. They celebrated Jefferson's advocacy for religious liberty and chastised those who criticized him "because he will not, dares not assume the prerogative of Jehovah and make Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ." They expressed a heartfelt desire "that the sentiments of our beloved President, which have had such genial Effect already, like the radiant beams of the Sun, will shine & prevail through all these States and all the world till Hierarchy and tyranny be destroyed from the Earth."
On New Year's Day, 1802, President Jefferson penned a reply. The carefully crafted letter reassured the Baptists of his commitment to their rights of conscience and struck back at the Congregationalist-Federalist establishment in New England for shamelessly vilifying him in the recent campaign. The First Amendment, he wrote, denied Congress the authority to establish a religion or prohibit its free exercise, "thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."
Jefferson's wall, according to conventional wisdom, represents a universal principle on the constitutional relationship between religion and the state. To the contrary, this wall had less to do with the separation between religion and all civil government than with the separation between national and state governments on matters pertaining to religion. The "wall of separation" was a metaphoric construction of the First Amendment, which Jefferson time and again said imposed its restrictions on the national government only (see, for example, Jefferson's 1798 draft of the Kentucky Resolutions).
How did this wall, limited in its jurisdictional application, come to exert such enormous influence on American law and politics? Jefferson's metaphor might have slipped into obscurity had it not been "rediscovered" by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1947. Asked to interpret the First Amendment's prohibition on laws "respecting an establishment of religion," the justices declared: "In the words of Jefferson," the First Amendment "erect[ed] 'a wall of separation between church and State' … [that] must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach."
This landmark ruling laid the foundations for a long line of legal decisions restricting religion's place in public life. The "wall" metaphor, in particular, provided the rationale for censoring religious expression in schools, stripping public spaces of religious symbols, and denying public benefits to faith communities.
The bitterness of the election of 1800 has long faded from public memory. The partisanship and rancorous rhetoric that characterized the contest, however, have become familiar features of the political culture. An enduring legacy of the campaign is the perennial debate regarding the constitutional place of religion in civic life. Religion, argues one side, is an indispensable support for political prosperity, providing a vital moral compass in a regime of self-government. The other side, echoing Jeffersonian partisans, asserts that social cohesion and democratic values are threatened whenever bricks are removed from the wall of separation between religion and politics.
This debate is as old as the Republic and as current as the morning newspaper. And what say you Gentle Reader?
11/10/08
Being Played?
Bailouts are going to reckless Wall Street bankers, to homeowners over their heads and now maybe even to Americans hooked on credit cards. Where's the reward in doing the right thing?
If you feel like you're being played, you're not alone.
The financial crisis has deepened many people's suspicions that doing the right thing hasn't paid off. Instead, they feel it's made them chumps.
You see it in the "Where's my @#$%ing bailout?" T-shirts, the despair about plummeting retirement accounts and the hostile comments that greet every news story about mortgage restructuring or credit card forgiveness.
One reader put it this way:
"Doesn't keeping your promises mean anything? Most if not all of the people who snagged these (mortgages) were well aware of the risk and the responsibility. It kills me that I'm playing by the rules and bailing out those who were greedy, stupid or both."
Even when they're not directing their anger at anyone in particular, many of my readers feel like they've been led down the garden path.
"I am 62 years old and HAD been planning to retire in 5 years," one wrote. "Although I have lived frugally my entire life and put away 15% of my income every year in a retirement account, my balanced portfolio lost 60% of its value in the last two months."
What he wanted to know: Would he be a bigger fool for pulling his money out of the market now or staying in and possibly suffering more lumps?
If you have similar questions -- if you suspect you're being a chump for making your mortgage payments, paying your credit card bills and continuing to invest in your 401(k) -- read on. You're certainly not alone as you watch others exploit loopholes, mistakes and well-intentioned remedies.
Bailed out but still ruined
The question of why some homeowners are getting bailouts has really been answered by the financial turmoil of the past few months. A huge spike in foreclosures, magnified by derivatives cooked up by Wall Street firms, nearly brought down the global economy. As it stands, we're still likely to suffer one heck of a hangover in the form of a serious recession.
The foreclosure mess is far from over. Many of the riskiest loans -- the ones where homeowners weren't even paying all the interest that was accumulating on their loans each month, let alone touching the principals -- are just now resetting.
If you feel like you're being played, you're not alone.
The financial crisis has deepened many people's suspicions that doing the right thing hasn't paid off. Instead, they feel it's made them chumps.
You see it in the "Where's my @#$%ing bailout?" T-shirts, the despair about plummeting retirement accounts and the hostile comments that greet every news story about mortgage restructuring or credit card forgiveness.
One reader put it this way:
"Doesn't keeping your promises mean anything? Most if not all of the people who snagged these (mortgages) were well aware of the risk and the responsibility. It kills me that I'm playing by the rules and bailing out those who were greedy, stupid or both."
Even when they're not directing their anger at anyone in particular, many of my readers feel like they've been led down the garden path.
"I am 62 years old and HAD been planning to retire in 5 years," one wrote. "Although I have lived frugally my entire life and put away 15% of my income every year in a retirement account, my balanced portfolio lost 60% of its value in the last two months."
What he wanted to know: Would he be a bigger fool for pulling his money out of the market now or staying in and possibly suffering more lumps?
If you have similar questions -- if you suspect you're being a chump for making your mortgage payments, paying your credit card bills and continuing to invest in your 401(k) -- read on. You're certainly not alone as you watch others exploit loopholes, mistakes and well-intentioned remedies.
Bailed out but still ruined
The question of why some homeowners are getting bailouts has really been answered by the financial turmoil of the past few months. A huge spike in foreclosures, magnified by derivatives cooked up by Wall Street firms, nearly brought down the global economy. As it stands, we're still likely to suffer one heck of a hangover in the form of a serious recession.
The foreclosure mess is far from over. Many of the riskiest loans -- the ones where homeowners weren't even paying all the interest that was accumulating on their loans each month, let alone touching the principals -- are just now resetting.
9/10/08
9/3/08
Let Freedom ring
"What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles."
Gentle Readers,
It is what we do- speak up-speak out -take a stand!
"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."
Imagine that we can travel back to the beginning of our country. What would we see, or think, would you take a stand or take a seat? Most would take a seat! But I think better of you Gentle Reader! I believe that you would have stood up for your country (even in it's infancy) You would have poured the tea in Bostons Harbor (the reason I drink coffee to this day)! Take a walk with me as we look back one more time, or perhaps the first time, for some of you.
It’s 1775. The year 1787, with its novel constitution and separation of church and state is a long 12 years away. At the moment, you and your friends are just a bunch of outlaws.
You’ve heard the debates in Parliament over taxation and representation; you’ve seen British troops enforce royal supremacy at the point of a bayonet. Your king, George III, and Parliament have issued a declaration asserting their sovereignty in "all cases whatsoever" in the colonies. You are, at least in New England, a people under siege with British troops quartered in Boston. You’ve dumped tea into Boston’s harbor in a fit of rage and had your port closed.
Who will you turn to now for direction? There are no presidents or vice-presidents, no supreme court justices or public defenders to call on. There are a handful of young, radical lawyers, like the Adams cousins, John and Samuel, but they’re largely concentrated in cities, while you and most of your friends live in the country. In many colonies, including Massachusetts, there are not even elected governors or councilors—they have all been appointed by the British crown and are answerable to it.
Where you turn is where you have habitually turned for over a century: to the prophets of your society, your ministers.
The American Revolutionary era is known as the "Golden Age of Oratory." What school child has not heard or read Patrick Henry’s immortal words, "Give me liberty or give me death"? Who has not seen reenactments or heard summaries of Ben Franklin’s heroic appearance before a hostile British Parliament?
Yet often lost in this celebration of patriotic oratory is the key role preaching played in the Revolutionary movement.
A few broad statistics can help us appreciate more fully the unique power the sermon wielded in Revolutionary America.
Over the span of the colonial era, American ministers delivered approximately 8 million sermons, each lasting one to one-and-a-half hours. The average 70-year-old colonial churchgoer would have listened to some 7,000 sermons in his or her lifetime, totaling nearly 10,000 hours of concentrated listening. This is the number of classroom hours it would take to receive ten separate undergraduate degrees in a modern university, without ever repeating the same course!
The pulpits were Congregational and Baptist in New England; Presbyterian, Lutheran, and German Reformed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; and Anglican and Methodist in the South. But no matter the denomination, colonial congregations heard sermons more than any other form of oratory. The colonial sermon was prophet, newspaper, video, Internet, community college, and social therapist all wrapped in one. Such was the range of its influence on all aspects of life that even contemporary television and personal computers pale in comparison.
Eighteenth-century America was a deeply religious culture that lived self-consciously "under the cope of heaven." In Sunday worship, and weekday (or "occasional") sermons, ministers drew the populace into a rhetorical world that was more compelling and immediate than the physical settlements surrounding them. Sermons taught not only the way to personal salvation in Christ but also the way to temporal and national prosperity for God’s chosen people.
Events were perceived not from the mundane, human vantage point but from God’s. The vast majority of colonists were Reformed or Calvinist, to whom things were not as they might appear at ground level: all events, no matter how mundane or seemingly random, were parts of a larger pattern of meaning, part of God’s providential design. The outlines of this pattern were contained in Scripture and interpreted by discerning pastors. Colonial congregations saw themselves as the "New Israel," endowed with a sacred mission that destined them as lead actors in the last triumphant chapter in redemption history.
Thus colonial audiences learned to perceive themselves not as a ragtag settlement of religious exiles and eccentrics but as God’s special people, planted in the American wilderness to bring light to the Old World left behind. Europeans might ignore or revile them as "fanatics," but through the sermon, they knew better. Better to absorb the barbs of English ridicule than to forget their glorious commission.
For over a century, colonial congregations had turned to England for protection and culture. Despite religious differences separating many colonists from the Church of England, they shared a common identity as Englishmen, an identity that stood firm against all foes. But almost overnight, these loyalties were challenged by a series of British imperial laws. Beginning with the Stamp Act of 1765 and running through the "Boston Massacre" of 1770, the Tea Act of 1773, and finally, martial law in Massachusetts, patriotic Americans perceived a British plot to deprive them of their fundamental English rights and their God-ordained liberties.
In the twentieth-century, taxation and representation are political and constitutional issues, having nothing to do with religion. But to eighteenth-century ears, attuned to lifetimes of preaching, the issues were inevitably religious as well, so colonists naturally turned to their ministers to learn God’s will about these troubling matters.
Tyranny Is "Idolatry"
When understood in its own times, the American Revolution was first and foremost a religious event. This is especially true in New England, where the first blood was shed.
By 1775 the ranks of Harvard- and Yale-educated clergymen swelled to over 600 ministers, distributed throughout every town and village in New England. Clergymen surveyed the events swirling around them; by 1775 liberals and evangelicals, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, men and women—all saw in British actions grounds for armed resistance.
In fact, not only was it right for colonists to resist British "tyranny," it would actually be sinful not to pick up guns.
How did they come to this conclusion? They fastened on two arguments.
First, they focused on Parliament’s 1766 Declaratory Act, which stated that Parliament had sovereignty over the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." For clergymen this phrase took on the air of blasphemy. These were fighting words not only because they violated principles of representative government but even more because they violated the logic of sola Scriptura ("Scripture alone") and God’s exclusive claim to sovereignty "in all cases whatsoever."
From the first colonial settlements, Americans—especially New England Americans—were accustomed to constraining all power and granting absolute authority to no mere human being.
For Reformed colonists, these ideas were tied up with their historic, covenant theology. At stake was the preservation of their identity as a covenant people. Not only did Parliament’s claims represent tyranny, they also represented idolatry. For colonists to honor those claims would be tantamount to forsaking God and abdicating their national covenant pledge to "have no other gods" before them.
In a classic sermon on the subject of resistance entitled A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, Boston’s Jonathan Mayhew, a liberal (he favored Unitarianism), took as his text Romans 13:1–6, in which Paul enjoins Christians to "be subject unto the higher powers." The day he picked for this sermon was portentous—it came on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, when Anglican ministers routinely abhorred the Puritan revolution, and Puritans routinely kept silent. Mayhew would not keep silent.
For centuries, rulers had used this text to discourage resistance and riot. But circumstances had changed, and in the chilling climate of impending Anglo-American conflict, Mayhew asked if there were any limits to this law. He concluded that the law is binding only insofar as government honors its "moral and religious" obligations. When government fails to honor that obligation, or contract, then the duty of submission is likewise nullified. Submission, in other words, is not unlimited.
Rulers, he said, "have no authority from God to do mischief.… It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors God’s ministers." Far from being sinful, resistance to corrupt ministers and tyrannical rulers is a divine imperative. The greater sin lies in passively sacrificing the covenant for tyranny, that is, in failing to resist.
Who determines whether government is "moral and religious"? In the Revolutionary era, the answer was simple: the individual. There were no established institutions that would support violent revolution. Ultimate justification resided in the will of a people acting self-consciously as united individuals joined in a common cause. Where a government was found to be deficient in moral and spiritual terms, the individual conscience was freed to resist.
America: A New Heaven
Clergy in the Revolutionary era reminded people not only what they were fighting against, namely tyranny and idolatry, but also what they were fighting for: a new heaven and a new earth.
Many early American settlers arrived believing they were part of the New Israel, that they would be instruments for Christ’s triumphant return to earth. Interpretations varied on whether the last days would be marked by progressive revelations and triumphs (the "postmillennial" view), or whether they would be marked by sudden judgments and calamities (the "premillennial" view), or some combination thereof. But all agreed the present was portentous, and American colonists were going to play a direct role in the great things looming.
Wars, first with France and later with England, accelerated these millennial speculations. In fighting against England and George III, people felt they were at once fighting against the Antichrist in a climactic battle between good and evil, tyranny and freedom.
Freedom and liberty (like individual) were both political and religious terms. They helped not only preserve fundamental human rights but also sustain loyalty to Christ and to sola Scriptura. So closely intertwined were the political and religious connotations, it was virtually impossible for colonists to separate them.
In his 1776 sermon on The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness, Samuel Sherwood examined the prophecies in the Book of Revelation and concluded that American Christians were the "church in the wilderness," nurtured in a faraway hiding place and raised to battle and defeat Antichrist. He argued that the powers of Antichrist were "not confined to the boundaries of the Roman empire, nor strictly to the territory of the pope’s usurped authority." Rather, they extended to all enemies of Christ’s church and people. He concluded that England’s monarchy "appears to have many of the features and much of the temper and character of the image of the beast."
In only slightly more secular terms, the greatest pamphlet of the Revolutionary era invoked this millennial imagery. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was the runaway bestseller of the American Revolution. In time Paine would be unveiled as a wild-eyed deist, and worse, an atheist. But you couldn’t guess that from Common Sense. It read like a sermon. Paine knew his audience well, and he knew what biblical allusions would bring them to arms.
His sermonic pamphlet begins by berating George III as the "royal brute" of England, noting that monarchy, like aristocracy, had its origins among ruffians who enforced their "superiority" at the point of a sword. Then they masked this brute coercion with the trappings of refined culture and regal bearing. Nevertheless, "How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust!" He then identifies the monarchy with tyranny, and tyranny with idolatry and blasphemy. Paine traces in elaborate detail Israel’s "national delusion" in requesting a king as did other nations, and God’s subsequent displeasure at a "form of government which so impiously invades the prerogative of heaven."
From scriptural precedent, Paine, the revivalist of revolt, concludes, "These portions of Scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the Scripture is false."
Paine then went on to echo ministerial visions of a new millennial age. With unmitigated confidence, Paine reiterated John Winthrop’s 17th-century Puritan vision of America as a "city upon a hill." But unlike Winthrop, Paine’s millennial city was modeled on republican principles (rather than hierarchical) and religious toleration (rather than state-enforced conformity). With words certain to thrill, he likened the colonists to a young tree on which small characters were carved, characters of liberty and freedom. In time this tree would grow huge, and with it, the characters boldly would proclaim the birth of a new adventure in freedom that would be seen throughout the world.
Many colonists were fearful that, if they failed, their leaders would be hung as traitors and the people enslaved in tyranny. But Paine exulted, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom.… How trifling, how ridiculous do the little paltry cavillings of a few weak or interested men appear when weighed against the business of a world."
With rhetoric like this, Paine fused the liberal Mayhew’s defense of resistance with an evangelical-like appeal to passion. It is not surprising that liberals and evangelicals united in "the business of a world."
Voice of Hope and Courage
No minister studied the rapidly unfolding events against scriptural teachings more closely than did Concord’s 32-year-old minister, William Emerson (grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson). For a long time, his world had been dominated by local concerns and salvation preaching. But all of this changed in March and April 1775, when all the members of his congregation were propelled into what he termed "the greatest events taking place in the present age."
By March, Emerson and other Concord patriots knew that British spies had infiltrated their town and informed General Thomas Gage of a hidden armory and munitions supplies stocked by the local "Sons of Liberty" (a secret society of radicals). Many believed Gage was planning a preemptive strike on these supplies, and they feared for their lives. At a muster of the Concord militia on March 13, Emerson preached a sermon on 2 Chronicles 13:12: "And behold, God himself is with us for our captain.… O children of Israel, fight ye not against the Lord God of your fathers, for ye shall not prosper" (KJV).
Never would he deliver a more momentous sermon. He had it within his means to promote or discourage an almost certainly violent call to arms. What was he to say? What was God’s will for his American people?
With obvious agitation, Emerson began his sermon with the somber note that recent intelligence warned of "an approaching storm of war and bloodshed." Many in attendance would soon be called upon for "real service." Were they ready? Real readiness, Emerson explained, depended not only on martial skill and weaponry but also on moral and spiritual resolve. To be successful, soldiers must believe in what they were fighting for, and they must trust in God’s power to uphold them. Otherwise they would scatter in fear before the superior British redcoats.
What were the men of Concord fighting for? In strident political terms that coupled the roles of prophet and statesman, Emerson argued for colonial resistance. For standing by their liberties and trusting only in God, the American people were "cruelly charged with rebellion and sedition." That charge, Emerson cried, was a lie put forward by plotters against American liberty. With all of the integrity of his sacred office behind him, Emerson took his stand before the Concord militia:
"For my own part, the more I reflect upon the movements of the British nation … the more satisfied I am that our military preparation here for our own defense is … justified in the eyes of the impartial world. Nay, for should we neglect to defend ourselves by military preparation, we never could answer it to God and to our own consciences of the rising [generations]."
The road ahead would be difficult, Emerson cautioned, but the outcome was one preordained from the beginning of time. Accordingly, the soldiers could go forth to war assured that "the Lord will cover your head in the day of battle and carry you on from victory to victory." In the end, he concluded, the whole world would know "that there is a God" in America.
On April 19, the mounting apprehensions became fact as 800 British troops marched on Lexington and Concord to destroy the patriot munitions. At Lexington, Gage’s troops were met by a small "army of observation," who were fired upon and sustained 17 casualties. From there the British troops marched to Concord. Before their arrival, the alarm had been sounded by patriot silversmith Paul Revere, and militiamen rushed to the common. William Emerson arrived first, and he was soon joined by "minutemen" from nearby towns. Again a shot was fired—the famed "shot heard ’round the world"—and in the ensuing exchange, three Americans and twelve British soldiers were killed or wounded. America’s colonial war for independence had begun.
Words like Emerson’s continued to sound for the next eight years, goading, consoling, and impelling colonists forward in the cause of independence. The pulpit served as the single most powerful voice to inspire the colonists.
For most American ministers and many in their congregations, the religious dimension of the war was precisely the point of revolution. Revolution and a new republican government would enable Americans to continue to realize their destiny as a "redeemer nation." If time would prove that self-defined mission tragically arrogant, it was not apparent to the participants themselves. With backs against the wall, and precious little to take confidence in, words like those of Mayhew’s, Emerson’s, and Paine’s were their only hope.
I'm a preacher first, last and always, called by God to stand up and tell you truths that some have never heard, truths that some have rejected, truths that can and will change lives. All the while I am a 'Prisoner for the Lord' Not in Jail but trapped by circumstances not of our own choosing but of God's. While Marti is still bed fast and I will not leave her side- but if she gets better- look out!!! WORDS
Love,
Denis
Gentle Readers,
It is what we do- speak up-speak out -take a stand!
"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."
Imagine that we can travel back to the beginning of our country. What would we see, or think, would you take a stand or take a seat? Most would take a seat! But I think better of you Gentle Reader! I believe that you would have stood up for your country (even in it's infancy) You would have poured the tea in Bostons Harbor (the reason I drink coffee to this day)! Take a walk with me as we look back one more time, or perhaps the first time, for some of you.
It’s 1775. The year 1787, with its novel constitution and separation of church and state is a long 12 years away. At the moment, you and your friends are just a bunch of outlaws.
You’ve heard the debates in Parliament over taxation and representation; you’ve seen British troops enforce royal supremacy at the point of a bayonet. Your king, George III, and Parliament have issued a declaration asserting their sovereignty in "all cases whatsoever" in the colonies. You are, at least in New England, a people under siege with British troops quartered in Boston. You’ve dumped tea into Boston’s harbor in a fit of rage and had your port closed.
Who will you turn to now for direction? There are no presidents or vice-presidents, no supreme court justices or public defenders to call on. There are a handful of young, radical lawyers, like the Adams cousins, John and Samuel, but they’re largely concentrated in cities, while you and most of your friends live in the country. In many colonies, including Massachusetts, there are not even elected governors or councilors—they have all been appointed by the British crown and are answerable to it.
Where you turn is where you have habitually turned for over a century: to the prophets of your society, your ministers.
The American Revolutionary era is known as the "Golden Age of Oratory." What school child has not heard or read Patrick Henry’s immortal words, "Give me liberty or give me death"? Who has not seen reenactments or heard summaries of Ben Franklin’s heroic appearance before a hostile British Parliament?
Yet often lost in this celebration of patriotic oratory is the key role preaching played in the Revolutionary movement.
A few broad statistics can help us appreciate more fully the unique power the sermon wielded in Revolutionary America.
Over the span of the colonial era, American ministers delivered approximately 8 million sermons, each lasting one to one-and-a-half hours. The average 70-year-old colonial churchgoer would have listened to some 7,000 sermons in his or her lifetime, totaling nearly 10,000 hours of concentrated listening. This is the number of classroom hours it would take to receive ten separate undergraduate degrees in a modern university, without ever repeating the same course!
The pulpits were Congregational and Baptist in New England; Presbyterian, Lutheran, and German Reformed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; and Anglican and Methodist in the South. But no matter the denomination, colonial congregations heard sermons more than any other form of oratory. The colonial sermon was prophet, newspaper, video, Internet, community college, and social therapist all wrapped in one. Such was the range of its influence on all aspects of life that even contemporary television and personal computers pale in comparison.
Eighteenth-century America was a deeply religious culture that lived self-consciously "under the cope of heaven." In Sunday worship, and weekday (or "occasional") sermons, ministers drew the populace into a rhetorical world that was more compelling and immediate than the physical settlements surrounding them. Sermons taught not only the way to personal salvation in Christ but also the way to temporal and national prosperity for God’s chosen people.
Events were perceived not from the mundane, human vantage point but from God’s. The vast majority of colonists were Reformed or Calvinist, to whom things were not as they might appear at ground level: all events, no matter how mundane or seemingly random, were parts of a larger pattern of meaning, part of God’s providential design. The outlines of this pattern were contained in Scripture and interpreted by discerning pastors. Colonial congregations saw themselves as the "New Israel," endowed with a sacred mission that destined them as lead actors in the last triumphant chapter in redemption history.
Thus colonial audiences learned to perceive themselves not as a ragtag settlement of religious exiles and eccentrics but as God’s special people, planted in the American wilderness to bring light to the Old World left behind. Europeans might ignore or revile them as "fanatics," but through the sermon, they knew better. Better to absorb the barbs of English ridicule than to forget their glorious commission.
For over a century, colonial congregations had turned to England for protection and culture. Despite religious differences separating many colonists from the Church of England, they shared a common identity as Englishmen, an identity that stood firm against all foes. But almost overnight, these loyalties were challenged by a series of British imperial laws. Beginning with the Stamp Act of 1765 and running through the "Boston Massacre" of 1770, the Tea Act of 1773, and finally, martial law in Massachusetts, patriotic Americans perceived a British plot to deprive them of their fundamental English rights and their God-ordained liberties.
In the twentieth-century, taxation and representation are political and constitutional issues, having nothing to do with religion. But to eighteenth-century ears, attuned to lifetimes of preaching, the issues were inevitably religious as well, so colonists naturally turned to their ministers to learn God’s will about these troubling matters.
Tyranny Is "Idolatry"
When understood in its own times, the American Revolution was first and foremost a religious event. This is especially true in New England, where the first blood was shed.
By 1775 the ranks of Harvard- and Yale-educated clergymen swelled to over 600 ministers, distributed throughout every town and village in New England. Clergymen surveyed the events swirling around them; by 1775 liberals and evangelicals, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, men and women—all saw in British actions grounds for armed resistance.
In fact, not only was it right for colonists to resist British "tyranny," it would actually be sinful not to pick up guns.
How did they come to this conclusion? They fastened on two arguments.
First, they focused on Parliament’s 1766 Declaratory Act, which stated that Parliament had sovereignty over the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." For clergymen this phrase took on the air of blasphemy. These were fighting words not only because they violated principles of representative government but even more because they violated the logic of sola Scriptura ("Scripture alone") and God’s exclusive claim to sovereignty "in all cases whatsoever."
From the first colonial settlements, Americans—especially New England Americans—were accustomed to constraining all power and granting absolute authority to no mere human being.
For Reformed colonists, these ideas were tied up with their historic, covenant theology. At stake was the preservation of their identity as a covenant people. Not only did Parliament’s claims represent tyranny, they also represented idolatry. For colonists to honor those claims would be tantamount to forsaking God and abdicating their national covenant pledge to "have no other gods" before them.
In a classic sermon on the subject of resistance entitled A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, Boston’s Jonathan Mayhew, a liberal (he favored Unitarianism), took as his text Romans 13:1–6, in which Paul enjoins Christians to "be subject unto the higher powers." The day he picked for this sermon was portentous—it came on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, when Anglican ministers routinely abhorred the Puritan revolution, and Puritans routinely kept silent. Mayhew would not keep silent.
For centuries, rulers had used this text to discourage resistance and riot. But circumstances had changed, and in the chilling climate of impending Anglo-American conflict, Mayhew asked if there were any limits to this law. He concluded that the law is binding only insofar as government honors its "moral and religious" obligations. When government fails to honor that obligation, or contract, then the duty of submission is likewise nullified. Submission, in other words, is not unlimited.
Rulers, he said, "have no authority from God to do mischief.… It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors God’s ministers." Far from being sinful, resistance to corrupt ministers and tyrannical rulers is a divine imperative. The greater sin lies in passively sacrificing the covenant for tyranny, that is, in failing to resist.
Who determines whether government is "moral and religious"? In the Revolutionary era, the answer was simple: the individual. There were no established institutions that would support violent revolution. Ultimate justification resided in the will of a people acting self-consciously as united individuals joined in a common cause. Where a government was found to be deficient in moral and spiritual terms, the individual conscience was freed to resist.
America: A New Heaven
Clergy in the Revolutionary era reminded people not only what they were fighting against, namely tyranny and idolatry, but also what they were fighting for: a new heaven and a new earth.
Many early American settlers arrived believing they were part of the New Israel, that they would be instruments for Christ’s triumphant return to earth. Interpretations varied on whether the last days would be marked by progressive revelations and triumphs (the "postmillennial" view), or whether they would be marked by sudden judgments and calamities (the "premillennial" view), or some combination thereof. But all agreed the present was portentous, and American colonists were going to play a direct role in the great things looming.
Wars, first with France and later with England, accelerated these millennial speculations. In fighting against England and George III, people felt they were at once fighting against the Antichrist in a climactic battle between good and evil, tyranny and freedom.
Freedom and liberty (like individual) were both political and religious terms. They helped not only preserve fundamental human rights but also sustain loyalty to Christ and to sola Scriptura. So closely intertwined were the political and religious connotations, it was virtually impossible for colonists to separate them.
In his 1776 sermon on The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness, Samuel Sherwood examined the prophecies in the Book of Revelation and concluded that American Christians were the "church in the wilderness," nurtured in a faraway hiding place and raised to battle and defeat Antichrist. He argued that the powers of Antichrist were "not confined to the boundaries of the Roman empire, nor strictly to the territory of the pope’s usurped authority." Rather, they extended to all enemies of Christ’s church and people. He concluded that England’s monarchy "appears to have many of the features and much of the temper and character of the image of the beast."
In only slightly more secular terms, the greatest pamphlet of the Revolutionary era invoked this millennial imagery. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was the runaway bestseller of the American Revolution. In time Paine would be unveiled as a wild-eyed deist, and worse, an atheist. But you couldn’t guess that from Common Sense. It read like a sermon. Paine knew his audience well, and he knew what biblical allusions would bring them to arms.
His sermonic pamphlet begins by berating George III as the "royal brute" of England, noting that monarchy, like aristocracy, had its origins among ruffians who enforced their "superiority" at the point of a sword. Then they masked this brute coercion with the trappings of refined culture and regal bearing. Nevertheless, "How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust!" He then identifies the monarchy with tyranny, and tyranny with idolatry and blasphemy. Paine traces in elaborate detail Israel’s "national delusion" in requesting a king as did other nations, and God’s subsequent displeasure at a "form of government which so impiously invades the prerogative of heaven."
From scriptural precedent, Paine, the revivalist of revolt, concludes, "These portions of Scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the Scripture is false."
Paine then went on to echo ministerial visions of a new millennial age. With unmitigated confidence, Paine reiterated John Winthrop’s 17th-century Puritan vision of America as a "city upon a hill." But unlike Winthrop, Paine’s millennial city was modeled on republican principles (rather than hierarchical) and religious toleration (rather than state-enforced conformity). With words certain to thrill, he likened the colonists to a young tree on which small characters were carved, characters of liberty and freedom. In time this tree would grow huge, and with it, the characters boldly would proclaim the birth of a new adventure in freedom that would be seen throughout the world.
Many colonists were fearful that, if they failed, their leaders would be hung as traitors and the people enslaved in tyranny. But Paine exulted, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom.… How trifling, how ridiculous do the little paltry cavillings of a few weak or interested men appear when weighed against the business of a world."
With rhetoric like this, Paine fused the liberal Mayhew’s defense of resistance with an evangelical-like appeal to passion. It is not surprising that liberals and evangelicals united in "the business of a world."
Voice of Hope and Courage
No minister studied the rapidly unfolding events against scriptural teachings more closely than did Concord’s 32-year-old minister, William Emerson (grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson). For a long time, his world had been dominated by local concerns and salvation preaching. But all of this changed in March and April 1775, when all the members of his congregation were propelled into what he termed "the greatest events taking place in the present age."
By March, Emerson and other Concord patriots knew that British spies had infiltrated their town and informed General Thomas Gage of a hidden armory and munitions supplies stocked by the local "Sons of Liberty" (a secret society of radicals). Many believed Gage was planning a preemptive strike on these supplies, and they feared for their lives. At a muster of the Concord militia on March 13, Emerson preached a sermon on 2 Chronicles 13:12: "And behold, God himself is with us for our captain.… O children of Israel, fight ye not against the Lord God of your fathers, for ye shall not prosper" (KJV).
Never would he deliver a more momentous sermon. He had it within his means to promote or discourage an almost certainly violent call to arms. What was he to say? What was God’s will for his American people?
With obvious agitation, Emerson began his sermon with the somber note that recent intelligence warned of "an approaching storm of war and bloodshed." Many in attendance would soon be called upon for "real service." Were they ready? Real readiness, Emerson explained, depended not only on martial skill and weaponry but also on moral and spiritual resolve. To be successful, soldiers must believe in what they were fighting for, and they must trust in God’s power to uphold them. Otherwise they would scatter in fear before the superior British redcoats.
What were the men of Concord fighting for? In strident political terms that coupled the roles of prophet and statesman, Emerson argued for colonial resistance. For standing by their liberties and trusting only in God, the American people were "cruelly charged with rebellion and sedition." That charge, Emerson cried, was a lie put forward by plotters against American liberty. With all of the integrity of his sacred office behind him, Emerson took his stand before the Concord militia:
"For my own part, the more I reflect upon the movements of the British nation … the more satisfied I am that our military preparation here for our own defense is … justified in the eyes of the impartial world. Nay, for should we neglect to defend ourselves by military preparation, we never could answer it to God and to our own consciences of the rising [generations]."
The road ahead would be difficult, Emerson cautioned, but the outcome was one preordained from the beginning of time. Accordingly, the soldiers could go forth to war assured that "the Lord will cover your head in the day of battle and carry you on from victory to victory." In the end, he concluded, the whole world would know "that there is a God" in America.
On April 19, the mounting apprehensions became fact as 800 British troops marched on Lexington and Concord to destroy the patriot munitions. At Lexington, Gage’s troops were met by a small "army of observation," who were fired upon and sustained 17 casualties. From there the British troops marched to Concord. Before their arrival, the alarm had been sounded by patriot silversmith Paul Revere, and militiamen rushed to the common. William Emerson arrived first, and he was soon joined by "minutemen" from nearby towns. Again a shot was fired—the famed "shot heard ’round the world"—and in the ensuing exchange, three Americans and twelve British soldiers were killed or wounded. America’s colonial war for independence had begun.
Words like Emerson’s continued to sound for the next eight years, goading, consoling, and impelling colonists forward in the cause of independence. The pulpit served as the single most powerful voice to inspire the colonists.
For most American ministers and many in their congregations, the religious dimension of the war was precisely the point of revolution. Revolution and a new republican government would enable Americans to continue to realize their destiny as a "redeemer nation." If time would prove that self-defined mission tragically arrogant, it was not apparent to the participants themselves. With backs against the wall, and precious little to take confidence in, words like those of Mayhew’s, Emerson’s, and Paine’s were their only hope.
I'm a preacher first, last and always, called by God to stand up and tell you truths that some have never heard, truths that some have rejected, truths that can and will change lives. All the while I am a 'Prisoner for the Lord' Not in Jail but trapped by circumstances not of our own choosing but of God's. While Marti is still bed fast and I will not leave her side- but if she gets better- look out!!! WORDS
Love,
Denis
6/18/08
Tolerance? and Religion
The faith that gave birth to tolerance is no longer tolerated!
How did America go from Pilgrims seeking freedom to express their Judeo-Christian beliefs to today’s discrimination against those very beliefs in the name of tolerance? “Back Fired” chronicles the history of this disturbing development now rampant in our country.
Do these headlines sound familiar?
Ten Commandments taken down
“Under God” removed from the Pledge
Prayer prohibited
Nativity Scenes banned
Salvation Army defunded
Boy Scouts sued
Christmas Carols stopped
Bible called ‘hate speech,’
Discover how tolerance evolved
From Pilgrims to Puritans
From Protestants to Catholics
From Liberal Christians to Jews
From Monotheists to Polytheists
From All Religions to Atheists
To only Politically Correct
“From its beginning, the new continent seemed destined to be the home of religious tolerance. Those who claimed the right of individual choice for themselves finally had to grant it to others.” – Calvin Coolidge, May 3, 1925
“The frustrating thing is that those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance. Question: Isn’t the real truth that they are intolerant of religion?” - Ronald Reagan, August 23, 1984
6/12/08
FAITH UNDER FIRE
FAITH UNDER FIRE
Gov't to pastor: Renounce faith!
Now banned from expressing moral opposition to homosexuality
----------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: June 09, 2008
10:00 pm Eastern
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
The Canadian government has ordered a Christian pastor to renounce his faith and never again express moral opposition to homosexuality, according to a new report.
In a decision handed down just days ago in the penalty phase of the quasi-judicial proceedings run by the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson was banned from expressing his biblical perspective of homosexuality and ordered to pay $5,000 for "damages for pain and suffering" as well as apologize to the activist who complained of being hurt.
According to a report from Pete Vere at the Catholic Exchange, the penalty could foreshadow the possible fate of Father Alphonse de Valk, who also has cited the biblical perspective on homosexuality in the nation's debate over same-sex "marriage" and now faces HRC charges.
Boisson had written a letter to the editor of his local Red Deer newspaper in 2002 denouncing the advance of homosexual activism as "wicked" and stating: "Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights."
The activist, local teacher Darren Lund, filed a complaint and the guilty verdict from Lori G. Andreachuk, a lawyer, was handed down some weeks ago. The latest decision involved the penalty phase of the trial.
"While agreeing that Boisson's letter was not a criminal act, the government tribunal nevertheless ordered the Christian pastor to [stop expressing his opinion]," Vere reported.
Andreachuk noted that Lund, who brought the complaint, wasn't, in fact, injured.
"In this case there is no specific individual who can be compensated as there is no direct victim who has come forward…," she wrote.
However, that did not stop her from order the payment anyway.
And as for the future, she wrote:
"Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc. shall cease publishing in newspapers, by e-mail, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals. Further, they shall not and are prohibited from making disparaging remarks in the future about … Lund or … Lund's witnesses relating to their involvement in this complaint. Further, all disparaging remarks versus homosexuals are directed to be removed from current Web sites and publications of Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc," the lawyer opined.
Andreachuk also ordered Boissoin to apologize for the original letter in the Red Deer Advocate and told the two "offenders" to pay $5,000.
The apology letter, Vere said, "threatens civil liberties in Canada, according to Ezra Levant, an author and lawyer who himself was targeted by an HRC attack."
"[The] government now believes that if it can't convince a Christian pastor that he's wrong, it will just order him to condemn himself?" Levant wrote on his blog. "Other than tribunals in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China, where is this Orwellian 'order' considered to be justice?"
"This is like a Third World jail-house confession – where accused criminals are forced to sign false statements of guilt," Levant wrote. "We don’t even 'order' murderers to apologize to their victims' families. Because we know that a forced apology is meaningless. But not if your point is to degrade Christian pastors."
"In essence, the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal is ordering to the minister to renounce his Christian faith, since his opposition to homosexuality is based upon the Judeo-Christian Bible," Vere wrote.
WND reported recently about de Valk, the target of a Human Rights Commission case over his biblical references regarding homosexuality.
"Father [de Valk] defended the [Catholic] Church's teaching on marriage during Canada's same-sex 'marriage' debate, quoting extensively from the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Pope John Paul II's encyclicals. Each of these documents contains official Catholic teaching. And like millions of other people throughout the world and the ages – many of whom are non-Catholics and non-Christians — Father believes that marriage is an exclusive union between a man and a woman," Vere wrote.
Vere raised the question that Canada now considers morality a "hate crime."
"If one, because of one's sincerely held moral beliefs, whether it be Jew, Muslim, Christian, Catholic, opposes the idea of same-sex marriage in Canada, is that considered 'hate'?" he asked.
Vere wrote that the response he got from Mark van Dusen, a spokesman for the federal human rights prosecution office, shocked him.
The government agent confirmed the agency investigates complaints but doesn't set public policy or moral standards. He said the agency job is to look at the circumstances and decide whether to advance it or dismiss it.
What is shocking about that, Vere wrote, is the admission that unjustified complaints can be dismissed, yet the case against de Valk has continued now for more than six months.
Gov't to pastor: Renounce faith!
Now banned from expressing moral opposition to homosexuality
----------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: June 09, 2008
10:00 pm Eastern
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
The Canadian government has ordered a Christian pastor to renounce his faith and never again express moral opposition to homosexuality, according to a new report.
In a decision handed down just days ago in the penalty phase of the quasi-judicial proceedings run by the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson was banned from expressing his biblical perspective of homosexuality and ordered to pay $5,000 for "damages for pain and suffering" as well as apologize to the activist who complained of being hurt.
According to a report from Pete Vere at the Catholic Exchange, the penalty could foreshadow the possible fate of Father Alphonse de Valk, who also has cited the biblical perspective on homosexuality in the nation's debate over same-sex "marriage" and now faces HRC charges.
Boisson had written a letter to the editor of his local Red Deer newspaper in 2002 denouncing the advance of homosexual activism as "wicked" and stating: "Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights."
The activist, local teacher Darren Lund, filed a complaint and the guilty verdict from Lori G. Andreachuk, a lawyer, was handed down some weeks ago. The latest decision involved the penalty phase of the trial.
"While agreeing that Boisson's letter was not a criminal act, the government tribunal nevertheless ordered the Christian pastor to [stop expressing his opinion]," Vere reported.
Andreachuk noted that Lund, who brought the complaint, wasn't, in fact, injured.
"In this case there is no specific individual who can be compensated as there is no direct victim who has come forward…," she wrote.
However, that did not stop her from order the payment anyway.
And as for the future, she wrote:
"Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc. shall cease publishing in newspapers, by e-mail, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals. Further, they shall not and are prohibited from making disparaging remarks in the future about … Lund or … Lund's witnesses relating to their involvement in this complaint. Further, all disparaging remarks versus homosexuals are directed to be removed from current Web sites and publications of Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc," the lawyer opined.
Andreachuk also ordered Boissoin to apologize for the original letter in the Red Deer Advocate and told the two "offenders" to pay $5,000.
The apology letter, Vere said, "threatens civil liberties in Canada, according to Ezra Levant, an author and lawyer who himself was targeted by an HRC attack."
"[The] government now believes that if it can't convince a Christian pastor that he's wrong, it will just order him to condemn himself?" Levant wrote on his blog. "Other than tribunals in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China, where is this Orwellian 'order' considered to be justice?"
"This is like a Third World jail-house confession – where accused criminals are forced to sign false statements of guilt," Levant wrote. "We don’t even 'order' murderers to apologize to their victims' families. Because we know that a forced apology is meaningless. But not if your point is to degrade Christian pastors."
"In essence, the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal is ordering to the minister to renounce his Christian faith, since his opposition to homosexuality is based upon the Judeo-Christian Bible," Vere wrote.
WND reported recently about de Valk, the target of a Human Rights Commission case over his biblical references regarding homosexuality.
"Father [de Valk] defended the [Catholic] Church's teaching on marriage during Canada's same-sex 'marriage' debate, quoting extensively from the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Pope John Paul II's encyclicals. Each of these documents contains official Catholic teaching. And like millions of other people throughout the world and the ages – many of whom are non-Catholics and non-Christians — Father believes that marriage is an exclusive union between a man and a woman," Vere wrote.
Vere raised the question that Canada now considers morality a "hate crime."
"If one, because of one's sincerely held moral beliefs, whether it be Jew, Muslim, Christian, Catholic, opposes the idea of same-sex marriage in Canada, is that considered 'hate'?" he asked.
Vere wrote that the response he got from Mark van Dusen, a spokesman for the federal human rights prosecution office, shocked him.
The government agent confirmed the agency investigates complaints but doesn't set public policy or moral standards. He said the agency job is to look at the circumstances and decide whether to advance it or dismiss it.
What is shocking about that, Vere wrote, is the admission that unjustified complaints can be dismissed, yet the case against de Valk has continued now for more than six months.
5/10/08
3/3/08
Another American sell out
Another "American Company" SELLS Out
Dear Gentle Readers,
In times like these it's nice to know who you can count on. In my humble opinion WAL Mart has gone over to the dark side. They use to provide USA made products but since the bottom line is profit for the High level corporate people [H. Lee Scott CEO] and stock holders.
Let me tell you about our experience. I purchased an Emerson 1000W Microwave oven (I cook almost entirely with the Microwave) last Friday with less that 6 months of light use the Microwave started to pour forth white smoke filling our small apartment with Marti Bed Fast and me suffering with COPD. You can imagine how frightening it was the Fire Department arrived but in the mean time. Marti was almost over come and I can't move her to safety in time to prevent serious health damage to her already weakened condition.
That was the Bad news now for the worse news. Even though the Microwave is still under warranty will Wal Mart stand behind their products? NO! I was given the run around put on hold (I tried to talk to the manager twice) to no avail. Where is this wonderful product made you may ask? "CHINA"
So far Gentle Reader, I have received no comment from the Corporate office, nor the Manager even though we are looking at over 100 seniors who could been killed? Justice in America? Fair play? or just profit?
I will keep you informed, pass this blog on if you like as I always (like the Texas Rangers get my man)
Denis
"Crime doesn't pay the customer/citizen does"
2/21/08
Liberal Fascism?
FASCISM A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition ...
Government Knows Best
By Jonah Goldberg
Type "New York City Council" and "ban" and "2007" into Google. Here's some of what you find:
A New York Times story: New York City Council Approves Ban on Metal Bats
A BBC News story: "Racial slur banned in New York."
A CNN story on how New York is considering banning "ultrathin" models.
A New York Sun article on how New York City is contemplating banning feeding pigeons.
A link to the Humane Society's effort to ban horse drawn carriages.
And that's on the first page alone.
These sorts of stories trickle-in almost hourly. Sometimes we hear them and are briefly distracted by them, other times we tune them out as background noise. And, most often, we simply forget them, these little human interest stories that amused us for a moment on talk radio or in back pages of a newspaper.
Sometimes we giggle about what's happening in other countries, without long pondering that places like Canada and Britain often blaze the trail we are on. For example:
In Britain, in a perfectly typical event quickly forgotten, police tracked down and nearly arrested an 11-year-old boy for calling a 10-year-old boy "gay" in an e-mail. This was considered a "very serious homophobic crime" requiring the full attention of police. In 2006, the coppers fingerprinted and threw a 14-year-old girl into jail for the crime of racism. Her underlying offense stemmed from the fact that she refused to join a class discussion with some fellow students because they were Asian and didn't speak English.
In England, traffic cameras are now trained on drivers to arrest them for eating in their cars. And in both Britain and Canada, the old Hitler Youth slogan, "Nutrition is not a private matter!" has taken on a new life. One expert this week argued that obesity must now be treated like Global Warming, requiring stern government intervention.
Health experts in Britain and Canada insist that the government has every right to meddle in the private life of its citizens since the state is picking up the tab for their healthcare (never mind that it's not the "state" but the taxpayers themselves). As Tony Harrison, a British health-care expert, explained to the Toronto Sun, "Rationing is a reality when funding is limited." So fat people and others can't get surgeries if bureaucrats or doctors don't think they're worthy of surgery. Now, of course, there's a certain logic here since the taxpayers are picking up the tab and someone has to make the hard choices about priorities. But it never occurs to these people that maybe the fact that the government is slowly being put in charge of many of the most important and personal issues in peoples' lives is in fact an argument against socialized medicine. It doesn't occur to them that refusing to unload seriously ill patients from ambulances, sometimes for hours at a time, just so emergency rooms can meet government quotas, is a sign that something is seriously wrong with the way statists handle medicine.
Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that the goal of Progressivism was to have the individual "marry his interests to the State." "Government" he wrote in book, "The State," "does now whatever experience permits or the times demand." "No doubt," he wrote elsewhere, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, "a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle."
He was hardly alone. "[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many," declared the pioneering progressive social activist Jane Addams.
The old story of the frog who doesn't jump out of the pot because the heat is turned up so slowly comes to mind.
On countless fronts, the natural pastures of daily liberty are being paved over by bureaucrats, politicians and other do-gooders. They aren't merely fixing problems as they come up. They are laying-down a path to a world where people like them are in charge of our lives, in large ways and small. And when you realize it, the funny stories we so often hear, aren't so funny anymore.
Jonah Goldberg is the author of the New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism.
1/29/08
"The Sky is falling"
The HEAVENS are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fullness thereof, thou hast founded them. (Psalm 89:11)
An asteroid at least 500 feet long will make a rare close fly by today, but there is no chance of an impact, scientists reported
Gentle reader,
Here is a wee bit of trivia that you may not know about me. In my undergraduate days my Major was Political Science. I was planing to study for the bar in Constitutional Law (the U.S. Constitution) But as always God had a better idea.
So if your planing to be around tomorrow, then consider this next bit of trivia.
The Democrats are shooting themselves in both feet at the same time.
First the squab ling that has gone on between Senators Obama and Clinton rather sounds to me like two school children fighting over... (fill in the blank) do you want some childish person as your principle (and English term for spokesman)
Add to that the So called Democratic Party (in all their wisdom had decided that in the States change their primary [the Party will not allow the states to have their delegates] vote in the up and coming nominations for the Party's President. Michigan has lost their rights and now so has Florida.
Do you think that your vote should count? If your a Democrat you might think twice about what is happening to your rights.
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to
the people.
Amendment 15
1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude. [Get that Democrat Party, may you don't to win an election any longer reign your kids in for the American people are not as stupid as you may think]
Hey, Lets just remember this great experiment is still Our Government. You are Gentle reader the government
"We The People"
Just my gentle reminder,
Love, Denis
1/23/08
No such thing
...as a free lunch!
Most merciful God,
there are many in this country
who hate themselves,
who consider their lives worthless,
who have not known the healing of love.
Touch them with the wonder and power
of your transforming love
that their lives may be made whole,
that they may find fulfillment in life,
that they may rejoice in your blessing.
Amen and Amen.
Gentle Reader,
As you know much of my background is in the study of History (I am not just a pretty Biblical-know-it-all {although I wish I did}) What I see I tell you because many have not the time nor the inclination to get off "my Space.com" to find out for themselves. Gentle Reader, America in in trouble "yes Sir right here in River City". But As the Prophet Hosea said "My people parish for the lack of Knowledge."
It is in this book that we discover that it is legal to create law that cause you to lose your job and pay fines on those who have the power and the money to buy the votes of those congressmen who we have sent to Washington D.C. to protect us (the working stiff) I suggest that you get the knowledge you need as David Cay Johnston a pulitzer prize winning author exposes such legal stealing by Wal-Mart (they don't pay the sales tax they collect) Or Steve Jobs and Donald Trump and President Gorge W. Bush all of theses and many more are legally stealing us blind.
An exhaustive litany of federal, state and even local giveaways to the very wealthy, described in agonizing and depressing detail. Beginning in the Reagan years, the U.S. government has placed a growing economic burden onto those least able to bear it, declares Johnston (Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich-and Cheat Everybody Else, 2003, etc.). It subsidizes the prosperous through tax breaks and other giveaways while stripping away protections for consumers, retirees, workers and investors. Starting with the sordid story of an exclusive Oregon golf course whose wealthy patrons enjoy recreation indirectly paid for by taxpayers, Johnston details dozens of giveaways, demonstrating beyond doubt that while government policies have made life much easier for those at the very top of the income pyramid, the great majority have it much worse than ever before. Examples range from the infamous-electricity deregulation, the collapse of Enron and the resulting astronomical spikes in the cost of power-to the obscure. In the latter category is Cabela's, a sporting-goods behemoth that convinced the citizens of tiny Hamburg, Pa., to grant it an exemption from property and sales taxes in exchange for locating a new megastore in their community. The total subsidy: some $8,000 for each man, woman and child in the community. With the promise of Jobs -that never came Stories like these are no longer shocking, Because the people in Washington D.C. have not been touched the way you have Gentle Reader! We need to absolutly CLEAN HOUSE!
It is up to you to get upset enough to get involved I know I nam doing what I can how about you?
Love, Denis
Most merciful God,
there are many in this country
who hate themselves,
who consider their lives worthless,
who have not known the healing of love.
Touch them with the wonder and power
of your transforming love
that their lives may be made whole,
that they may find fulfillment in life,
that they may rejoice in your blessing.
Amen and Amen.
Gentle Reader,
As you know much of my background is in the study of History (I am not just a pretty Biblical-know-it-all {although I wish I did}) What I see I tell you because many have not the time nor the inclination to get off "my Space.com" to find out for themselves. Gentle Reader, America in in trouble "yes Sir right here in River City". But As the Prophet Hosea said "My people parish for the lack of Knowledge."
It is in this book that we discover that it is legal to create law that cause you to lose your job and pay fines on those who have the power and the money to buy the votes of those congressmen who we have sent to Washington D.C. to protect us (the working stiff) I suggest that you get the knowledge you need as David Cay Johnston a pulitzer prize winning author exposes such legal stealing by Wal-Mart (they don't pay the sales tax they collect) Or Steve Jobs and Donald Trump and President Gorge W. Bush all of theses and many more are legally stealing us blind.
An exhaustive litany of federal, state and even local giveaways to the very wealthy, described in agonizing and depressing detail. Beginning in the Reagan years, the U.S. government has placed a growing economic burden onto those least able to bear it, declares Johnston (Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich-and Cheat Everybody Else, 2003, etc.). It subsidizes the prosperous through tax breaks and other giveaways while stripping away protections for consumers, retirees, workers and investors. Starting with the sordid story of an exclusive Oregon golf course whose wealthy patrons enjoy recreation indirectly paid for by taxpayers, Johnston details dozens of giveaways, demonstrating beyond doubt that while government policies have made life much easier for those at the very top of the income pyramid, the great majority have it much worse than ever before. Examples range from the infamous-electricity deregulation, the collapse of Enron and the resulting astronomical spikes in the cost of power-to the obscure. In the latter category is Cabela's, a sporting-goods behemoth that convinced the citizens of tiny Hamburg, Pa., to grant it an exemption from property and sales taxes in exchange for locating a new megastore in their community. The total subsidy: some $8,000 for each man, woman and child in the community. With the promise of Jobs -that never came Stories like these are no longer shocking, Because the people in Washington D.C. have not been touched the way you have Gentle Reader! We need to absolutly CLEAN HOUSE!
It is up to you to get upset enough to get involved I know I nam doing what I can how about you?
Love, Denis
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