This is part two of my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Part one can be seen here)

The second speaker of the day was Brad Birzer who regaled us on America’s Judeo-Christian History.

Bizer began his session by noting that historian Donald Lutz discovered that the founders used Christian references in their pre-war writing far more than any other source. St. Paul was the most referenced New Testament figure with Micah 4:4 being the most referenced Old Testament verse.

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

On this Lutz quotation, though, I want to clarify something. Many have bandied about the claim that Donald Lutz said that 34 percent of the founder’s writing contain direct Biblical citations. This claim is not altogether true. On the other hand, it is not something to quickly dismiss as fans of the Enlightenment influence want to do, either.

The problem is that Lutz’ research didn’t reveal that this 34 percent came “directly” from Biblical citations. What Lutz found was that the Bible and quotes from sermons of the period added up to his finding of 34 percent. Lutz wasn’t saying the 34 percent was made up solely of Biblical quotations. It is a bit misleading to say that this large number of citations “came from the Bible” when a portion came from the sermons of famous preachers of the era — and political sermons at that. Granted sermons are generally of religious content, but a quote for a sermon isn’t the same thing as a direct citation from the Bible.

Add to this the fact that Lutz also found that the Federalist Papers and the debates about the Constitution contain very few Biblical citations and we get another shade of this debate that is necessary to consider. Many Atheists and Enlightenment influence fans claim that the lack of Biblical citations during this second period of the American founding proves that religion was meaningless. But I warn these deniers that Lutz was also not saying that the Bible was meaningless. In his study, after he notes that the Biblical influence seemed to disappear from the founder’s writing during the Constitutional phase, Lutz says it isn’t “surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has little to say.”

The fact is that this 34 percent of Protestant Religious citations isn’t meaningless. It still shows that a great preponderance of the founder’s citations were religiously based, and of the Protestant religion at that. It also shows that religious appeals formed a large part of the thinking of the founding era as they geared up both for war with Britain and the formation of the United States of America.

I sort of wish that Birzer had gone into this further, but I understand why he didn’t. He had a finite amount of time and this diversion would have moved away from his main point. In any case, both sides make at the same time too much and too little of Lutz’ study.

Birzer next noted that America was, indeed, a land of religious freedom even if its particular parts were “islands of intolerance.” He notes that the religious freedom that our early years are famous for did exist, but not in the laissez faire style we’d like to wish it were. Sure it was illegal to be a Catholic in Maryland after 1689, for instance, or one had to be an Anglican to hold office in Virginia but those particular restrictions were less extent in other parts of the country. Each segment had its particular religious sect as the officially recognized religion, but there wasn’t a single religion for all of the colonies leaving people free to choose where they might like to live in accordance with their individual principles.

The summation is that religion played a supremely important part in the early days from the first colonists to the founding era.

As an example Birzer notes that as laid out in his “On Conciliation With America,” Edmund Burke’s characterization of the American Colonies was that the colonies were born of English liberty and religion.

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole… This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes…

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.

Birzer, though, also pointed out that a chief motivating factor in rallying Americans to the revolutionary cause was an anti-Catholicism that was inflamed by the Crown’s 1774 Quebec Act that gave an official Crown-recognized status to French Catholics in Canada. This fear of “Papism” led many Americans to fear for their liberties expecting a creeping Catholic tyranny to invade their colonies through the Crown’s apostasy.

Birzer notes, though, that in many ways the establishment of local rule in the colonies was a bloodless coup of sorts. He gives the example of Charles Carroll of Carrollton a Roman Catholic who led Marylanders to form an extra legal government that eventually simply took over the colony as the official government in the minds of the people. At some point, the poor Royal Governor had to just go home because he was simply ignored by the whole colony as they favored their fellows instead.

Of course, Carroll’s efforts led him to become a celebrated citizen despite his Catholic religion and this, in turn, broke down some of those religious barriers for Catholics, at least in Maryland.

Birzer really pressed the point, though, that the main reason that colonists feared Papism was because of the top-down leadership of the Church, a style that necessarily negated, as far as they were concerned, the liberties that the colonists valued above all else.

He summed up his talk by asking of us all a question. In some parts of the colonies, men were required by law to bring two things to church with them on a Sunday morning: Their Bible and their rifle. These men were ready to give their all to protect their liberties. But are we today still ready to reclaim what is ours? With all the world flexing its muscles, from North Korea, to China to Iran, are we as Americans ready to fight to reclaim our legacy of freedom or are we to roll over and allow an out-of-control, socialist government to usurp our liberties as enemies gather at our gates?

Next: More British Than the British!

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Judge Andrew Napolitano announced on the Glenn Beck Show this week that he is planning to do a Constitutional Law seminar on Fox News. I see this as the next avenue of Tea Parties: We begin to talk about the U.S. Constitution, and what liberty really consists of, in detail, and we keep talking about it.

Thomas Jefferson said:

“… God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed.

The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.

If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty…. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950)

That is an awesome quotation – an awesome thought.

Napolitano is the author of a wonderfully informative book, Constitutional Chaos. I’m looking forward to the lecture or lectures as a way to get the conversation started.

Not everyone is anxious to hear the Judge’s ideas, however. It would be naive to think Liberals would be interested in the U.S. Constitution. I found one Liberal site admitting they are “more than a little queasy” at some of the issues Napolitano addressed yesterday:

Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost.

More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal and tender mercies of federal bureaucrats. It was not intended to be this way.

We can vote the bums out of their cushy federal office

…we can persuade the state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care where the Constitution gives the federal government zero authority.

We can ask our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, to return the selection of US senators to state legislatures and to nullify, to nullify! all the laws that Congress has written that are not based on the Constitution.

But there is one thing we can’t do. Just sit back and take it.”

Napolitano has been laying out our politically incorrect abuse of the US Constitution for a very long time. Here’s a snippet from the introduction to his book Constitutional Chaos:

What’s at Stake in America Today

I, myself, am a strong and fervent believer in Natural Law. The only valid laws are those grounded in a pursuit of goodness. Anything else – like taking property from Person A and giving it to Person B, like silencing an unpopular minority, like interfering with freedom of worship – is an unjust law, and, theoretically, need not be obeyed. St. Thomas Aquinas said only just laws impose an obligation of obedience, because unjust laws are not within the power of the government to enact; and only laws that seek goodness are just. This is the essence of Natural Law. No government may enact laws interfering with our freedoms no matter how popular the enactment.

The positivist would say since the government gives freedom, the government can take it away. The Natural Law says only God gives freedom and the government can only take it away as a punishment for violating the Natural Law, and then only through due process.

To a positivist, the government’s goal is to bring about the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. Under the Natural Law, the only legitimate goal of government is to secure liberty, which is the freedom to obey one’s own free will and conscience, rather than the free wills or consciences of others.

The problem today in America – the greatest and gravest threat to personal freedom in this country – is that the positivists are carrying the day. Under their sway, the government violates the law while busily passing more legislation to abridge our liberties.

If we wish to survive the near future with our rights intact, we need to understand the size and scope of the threat. We must also understand its true identity: a government that breaks its own laws. ~  Constitutional Chaos, Judge Andrew Napolitan

About Natural Law, new President George Washington said:

The foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; …the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained…”

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But this hasn’t left the Left at a loss to explain Nidal Malik Hasan’s horrific killing spree. It was caused by all the things liberals don’t like — guns, for example. To quote Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, whose corrupt machine politics helped produce our Community Organizer in Chief:

Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.

Likewise, it was America’s unfortunate love of air travel that caused Hasan’s colleagues to fly passenger airliners into buildings full of innocent people on September 11. You don’t blame a group, unless that group is normal Americans.

If anything good can come of the Islamic atrocity at Fort Hood, it is that liberals in both the government and the media have now squandered the absolute last of their credibility. It simply isn’t possible for them to deny any longer that their depraved ideology puts them on the side of the savages who are trying to destroy us.

On a tip from Charlie G. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Today, President Obama signed into law a bill that will dramatically expand the federal hate crimes law, enabling prosecutors to bring federal charges against people who were previously found innocent of hate crimes in state court. The hate-crimes provisions were added to a defense appropriations bill, which the President signed in a White House signing ceremony this afternoon at around 2:30 p.m.

The new law dramatically expands the reach of the existing federal hate-crimes law that was already on the books, by getting rid of the requirement that a hate crime affect federally-protected activities to be prosecuted in federal court. It also adds sexual orientation, gender, disability, and transgender characteristics to a law that was originally designed to protect racial minorities.

The hate-crimes bill was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for allowing the reprosecution in federal court of people found innocent in state court. The Commission called the new law a “menace to civil liberties” because it is an end-run around constitutional guarantees against double-jeopardy.

As explained earlier, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy. Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer thus object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds. Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of prosecuting all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).

Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial. When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.

The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision.

Passage of the bill was aided by lousy reporting, in which some journalists, like Reuters, depicted the bill as simply a harmless measure to add sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics covered by the federal hate-crimes law, ignoring its many other, far more important (and dangerous) changes to federal hate-crimes law.

Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.
But it is a view widely shared among supporters of the hate-crimes bill. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for prosecution if prosecutors fail to obtain a conviction “in the state court.”

Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.

As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.” Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.

The Obama administration has long supported the hate-crimes bill, which it used as a wedge issue in the 2008 election.

As law professors like Jonathan Turley and Eugene Volokh have noted, the Obama administration recently urged restrictions on hate speech at the United Nations, joining in calls to treat such speech, protected by the First Amendment under Supreme Court rulings, as a human-rights violation in violation of international human-rights treaties. In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, discussing the racial implications of the death penalty, and calling homosexuality immoral. In Canada and Britain, hate speech laws have been used to punish religious criticism of Scientology and homosexuality.

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Congress and the Obama administration are about to take up one of the most fundamental issues stemming from the near collapse of the financial system last year — how to deal with institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to rescue them when they get in trouble.

Sounds reasonable, right? When these huge private institutions fail, it harms lots and lots of Americans. So, what’s the answer?

A senior administration official said on Sunday that after extensive consultations with Treasury Department officials, Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, would introduce legislation as early as this week. The measure would make it easier for the government to seize control of troubled financial institutions, throw out management, wipe out the shareholders and change the terms of existing loans held by the institution.

That, by definition, would be Socialism, where the Government is seizing the means of production.

The official said the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, was planning to endorse the changes in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday.

Shocking, I know!

The White House plan as outlined so far would already make it much more costly to be a large financial company whose failure would put the financial system and the economy at risk. It would force such institutions to hold more money in reserve and make it harder for them to borrow too heavily against their assets.

Setting up the equivalent of living wills for corporations, that plan would require that they come up with their own procedure to be disentangled in the event of a crisis, a plan that administration officials say ought to be made public in advance.

So, what you have is the “don’t call him a Socialist” president creating plans and legislation for the Federal government to actually become involved in the running of private companies before they get into any trouble.

Feel better about which way your Freedoms are heading?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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A 17-year-old Eagle Scout in upstate New York has been barred from stepping foot on school grounds for 20 days — for keeping a 2-inch pocketknife locked in a survival kit in his car.

Matthew Whalen, a senior at Lansingburgh Senior High School, says he follows the Boy Scout motto and is always prepared, stocking his car with a sleeping bag, water, a ready-to-eat meal — and the knife, which was given to him by his grandfather, a police chief in a nearby town.

But Lansingburgh High has a zero-tolerance policy, and when school officials discovered that Whalen kept his knife locked in his car, he says, they suspended him for five days — and then tacked on an additional 15 after a hearing.

Nothing sums up the mind frame of the totalitarian moonbats that run our schools like the phrase “zero tolerance.”

This pointless exercise in petty tyranny could jeopardize Whalen’s dream of attending West Point.

On a tip from Frank W. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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The Illinois Supreme Court has affirmed a decision by the Third District Appellate Court that ruled that the definition of a “case” for transporting a firearm does, indeed, include an automobile’s enclosed front seat console.

The current law provides for several ways that a firearm can be transported:

(4) Carries or possesses in any vehicle or concealed on or about his person except when on his land or in his own abode or fixed place of business any pistol, revolver, stun gun or taser or other firearm, except that this subsection (a) (4) does not apply to or affect transportation of weapons that meet one of the following conditions:
(i) are broken down in a non-functioning state; or
(ii) are not immediately accessible; or
(iii) are unloaded and enclosed in a case,firearm carrying box, shipping box, or other container by a person who has been issued a currently valid Firearm Owner’s Identification Card

IllinoisCarry.com celebrated the decision as a “huge win” for Illinois gun owners.

The case in question, People vs Diggins, involved the transportation of two unloaded firearms and two loaded magazines in the console of a vehicle driven by an individual in possession of a valid FOID card. In unanimous agreement the justices ruled the trial judge erred in denying defense the right to argue that a console is considered a “case” or “other container” under sec. 24 -1.4(c)iii and for instructing the jury that the console is not considered a “case”.

This ruling would also seem to resolve the question as to the legality of transporting unloaded handguns in the glove box of a vehicle by IL citizens in possession of a valid FOID card.

Of course, the law still states that firearms must be carried outside of a vehicle in some sort of case specifically built for a firearm so one wonders exactly how practical this new interpretation of the law will be?

Still, this is a step in the right direction for curtailing the capriciousness of our absurdly strict gun transportation laws.

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Jennings failed to report a case of statutory rape of a 15 year old who confided in him that he had had sex with a much older man at a train station. Jennings’ did express concern that the boy use a condom.

•Jennings wrote the forward to a book called “Queering Elementary Education”. Bonus: Another familiar face wrote one of the endorsements on the book jacket—Bill Ayers. Ayers, of course, is the former Weather Underground bomber, and Obama pal, and ghostwriter, who worked with him on school related boards in Chicago during the nineties.
•Jennings and his organization, GLSEN sponsored conferences where homosexual activists instructed children age 14 and up on how to perform homosexual acts. How bad was it? When a recording from one of these conferences became public, the firestorm that ensued became known as “fistgate”.

•Jennings in 1997 reportedly praised Harry Hay of the North American Association for Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which promotes the legalization of sexual abuse of young boys by older men. You can read the transcript of Jennings asserting that “one of the people that’s always inspired me is Harry Hay”, here.

•Jennings has a history of ridiculing and demeaning Christians: Reportedly said of Christians—“ F___ ‘em” while speaking at Marble Collegiate Church in March of 2000.

The media are whitewashing Jennings, so the blogosphere needs to speak out loudly, and Americans need to demand this pervert resign.

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Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it “Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold.”

The note was a follow-up to Ensign’s questioning at the markup.

SOURCE

(For more postings on healthcare, see SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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If this isn’t the perfect evidence of why any freedom loving western citizen should be against gun registries, then you can’t make the case at all. Over the last few weeks the police in Toronto, Canada have been stormtrooping through the homes of average, everyday Torontonians that have had the misfortune to have appeared on the area’s gun registry and confiscating their legally owned guns.

What has been the pretext for this massive gun confiscation program? Unfortunately, the restrictive gun laws in Canada allow authorities to stomp through any citizen’s home and demand to see where that citizen stores his legally owned firearm. At that point, if this brownshirted police thug decides that the citizen is not storing the firearm to the law’s liking, then that citizen may have his firearm immediately stolen by the state.

Toronto’s jackbooted cops have confiscated nearly 400 firearms from basically law abiding citizens claiming that they are making the city safer. How? Why, because now criminals won’t be able to steal these guns from the public, naturally. So, because a few criminals might steal a gun here and there, these government tyrants feel that they should take everyone’s rights from them.

Catch this pretzel logic from one of Toronto’s top tyrants.

“Legal handgun owners are not dangerous individuals,” Blair told reporters at a Tuesday news conference. “But we know from experience that their firearms can become extremely dangerous when they get into the hands of criminals. And so we have undertaken a number of initiatives to reduce the availability of those handguns.”

Legal owners are not dangerous… so let’s put them at the mercy of criminals. Isn’t that a great idea?

Gosh. Seems to me a car gets stolen every once in a while, even in Toronto. Shouldn’t we have the cops forcefully steal every car from Toronto’s citizenry to prevent this crime?

But here is the real lesson. If the government has your name on a list of gun owners you WILL lose your rights eventually. The state WILL invade your home and take away your right to self-protection at some point. That is the sole reason to have a state gun registry, so that the state can kick down your door and take your firearms from you.

Toronto’s toadie cops have proven this singular truth.

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