In The Constitution: December 2014

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Christian Principles Glue Society Together

It’s Christmas, when believers in our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, celebrate His divine birth and life. We have had His teachings since He taught them to our first parents in the Garden of Eden. Throughout history, societies that have honored Christian principles have prospered and those who have renounced them have fallen. The strength of a nation’s character can be measured by its devotion to Christian virtues. They are the glue that binds us; they keep a culture sane.
Even those who claim to not believe in a God cannot make society work without Christian principles, the foundation of all good relationships. Kindness, fairness, honesty and integrity are Christian components. Thrift, responsibility, love and compassion are also among Christian principles. Who would want to live in a society without those attributes? It is not from isolation or from nothing that these virtues have emerged — they came from the teachings of Jehovah. The world doesn’t work without them. People descend into selfishness, and ultimately into depravity, without the tethering influence of Christianity.

During our prosperous years, Christian values supported U.S. social policy. We went to church on Sundays and lived our Sunday principles all week. We believed in living within our means, individually and collectively. We accepted the sanctity of marriage, that intimacy was reserved for marriage and children deserved a father and mother who were married to each other. We expected businesses and government to operate with integrity.
Not only are Christian principles the basis of religious law, they are the basis of civil law as well. We have the pattern in the Old Testament. Our Founders’ concept to divide power between an executive, a legislative body and a judicial system came partly from Isaiah, who explained the roles of Jesus Christ concerning the law: “For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us” (Isaiah 33:22). Our Founders knew the ancient law well, as they were, almost to a man, devout students of the biblical record. Under the pattern of Christianity’s Old Testament civil law, the United States became prosperous: By 1905, we produced 50 percent of the world’s goods with only five percent of her land mass and six percent of her population. Our common written and ratified “constitutions,” rights of self-protection and private property ownership, and duties matched to rights also unite us. Justice based on investigation of facts and multiple witnesses defines both cultures. It isn’t hard to find the gold and silver standard and the free enterprise system that prospered in ancient Israel as well as in our nation during our prosperous days. (Sadly, we have abandoned our precious metals standard and regulated free enterprise into atrophy.)
A serious argument can be drawn about America’s devotion to Christian ethics today. We have aborted 55 million babies. Pornography is rampant and the traditional family is in decline. Many of our larger cities are rife with random shootings and looting and individuals are not safe — we are awash in violence. Our national policy has embraced Frederic Bastiat’s “legal plunder” of workers to support the deliberately idle. Forty percent of babies in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, indicating that promiscuity is the norm. Groups with radical agendas are pushing Christianity out of the public square and it is increasingly difficult for ordinary citizens to express personal beliefs. Greed from both the corporate and government sectors is appalling. Apathy shrouds us, as many Americans ignore their responsibility to be informed and take action to change our circumstances.
George Orwell is credited with saying, “In a time of universal confusion, stating the obvious is a revolutionary act.” This, then, is the obvious: The United States is falling apart morally. If the Constitution doesn’t work today, it’s because we are no longer a people worthy of its principles. It is not just America that is careening down the road to disaster; Christianity is headed there. Too many Christians are either buying into anti-Christian beliefs and practices or compromising them into obscurity — beliefs in moral integrity, the sanctity of human life, the traditional family, sound economics and the necessity of Christian worship, to name a few. We are losing the concept that Christians do what Christians are supposed to do, and they believe what Christian values teach. Our enemies are systematically dismantling both constitutional liberty and Christian principles.
The United States was founded on Christianity and the great men in our history warned it must remain so. Samuel Langdon, a Congregational pastor speaking to the New Hampshire state legislature in 1788, before its vote to ratify the Constitution, said: “I call upon you to preserve the knowledge of God in the land. ... If you ... renounce that religion ... commanded in the Holy Scriptures, think no more of freedom, peace and happiness”.
Many solutions are offered for our increasingly lawless moral morass: Take away our guns, give still more welfare, impose more regulations and allow even less individual autonomy, among others. None of these will solve the problems. If we want freedom, protection, prosperity and peace, we must return to the widespread practice of Christian principles. Only virtue will restore safety and security, the virtue of people who choose to do what is right because it is right.
It is part of the season to evaluate our commitment to Christianity. May we engrave its virtues on our hearts! Merry Christmas!

This post was originally published in the Daily Herald Dec. 22, 2014: http://www.heraldextra.com/news/opinion/local-guest-opinions/openshaw-christian-principles-glue-society-together/article_a9d456ff-3fb7-5d65-89be-8c9865f2372a.html

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Monday, December 22, 2014

It’s Our Job to Discipline Elected Officials

Discipline is often unpopular. Children avoid it, teens dislike it and parents are determined to give it to their offspring. As citizens, we need to discipline errant leaders. We must insist on discipline from those who serve in office; otherwise, there will be none.
Parents occasionally learn what happens when they let kids ignore the rules. Chaos follows, and it’s hard to restore order. Ditto for a nation — let officials get away with mischief and you see the ugly side of crisis. The U.S. is approaching that stage now; we are faced with elected officials that badly need some discipline.

American constitutionalism can be described as a grandson once described football: It’s really simple, but it’s very complex. Our simple system is self-regulating: We like what our leaders do or we change them, with the voting process as our usual method. When that proves insufficient, especially for those who destroy the common good, things become more complex and require drastic action. We must then impeach the offender. This essential cleansing step protects from the abuses of a few. In business, it's “You’re fired;” in driving, you lose your license; in churches, you get excommunicated. In politics we impeach to discipline; not frivolously but for excellent cause. This key self-regulator is on a par with chemotherapy for cancer or pulling an abscessed tooth — it’s painful. If we must save the system, however, we have a vehicle to do so.
Deeds that invite this drastic discipline are serious threats to the nation, but we must insist to our elected representatives and government officials that they are not above the law, that they serve under the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson explained the dilemma of bad government in the Declaration of Independence: “whenever any Form of government is destructive ... it is the Right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government.“ That action extends to individuals, as well: Article II section 4 of the Constitution tells us to impeach a president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors.” Treason is defined in the Constitution as “levying war against (the United States) or ... adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”
President Obama has met the impeachable criteria many times over. In Benghazi, he stood with the enemy that killed Americans and then deceived the American people. In the IRS scandal, he waged war against Americans across his political aisle. On immigration, his executive orders legalized those here illegally, including those known in their home nations as criminals and gang members. He offered them financial support without permission from the American people. His actions stirred protests from his own and the media, which usually issues him a blank check. He has, and continues to, lie on a dozen matters, including emerging proof of his deliberate public deceptions on Obamacare — the Affordable Care Act. All of these actions and more demand our discipline.
The process to impeach requires both houses of Congress. The House of Representatives brings the charges and the Senate, under oath, conducts the trial to remove from office. Thus, Congress must carry out this agenda. Our past experience with President Clinton has confused the issue: The House brought charges, the Senate stalled and Clinton remained in office. Will the current legislature act on illegalities? We should demand it; the Republicans — the party of opposition — should insist on it. Republican leadership, however, is weak and ineffectual, dedicated to whining and capitulation. With massive evidence pushing the situation, we need action.

When federal officials break the law without consequence, state officials follow suit, and they are. As an example, there have been at least 24 illegal changes made unilaterally by President Obama to his own healthcare law since its passage rendered it unchangeable (Galen Institute, November 2014). Is it any wonder that Grassfire now reports the newly elected governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliff, an Obama protégé, has now unconstitutionally altered Virginia’s Obamacare laws as well? The copycat syndrome is real and illegality spreads. With little warning, official violations of the law could become the norm, bringing tyranny. Taking action to halt abuses of power will send a message to officials at all levels: “We are watching. Obey the law.”
Disciplining our elected officials is our constitutional duty. It is also a moral and political necessity. If we don’t punish infractions, why would the infractions stop? If we don’t insist on law and order, we will have neither.
When bad leaders get into office or good leaders go bad, they must be mercifully removed to preserve the Union. It’s a citizen duty to do so — the price we pay for the freedoms we use. There is great danger in not impeaching when actions warrant it. If we refuse, we declare that our system isn’t worth fighting for, or that we are too timid to do the hard stuff. We nullify our own protections when we fail to use them. The decision to impeach is a statement of values and priorities: We value justice enough to get it, to pay the price of time and attention to insist on it.
It is our constitutional duty to impeach those who destroy freedom. “America is our name, and freedom is our game.” That’s been our motto for 227 years now. If we plan to keep it, we have some housecleaning to do.

Biggest Brother Wants Your Children

Of all the dark clouds forming on America’s horizon, few are more worrisome than the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This treaty, if passed by our Senate, would be used to replace constitutional protections to families and impair your right to govern your children. The family is the basic unit of government, and communities keep government close to the family to protect freedoms. Cities form counties which form states to shield families from an overreaching federal government. This threat goes beyond federal encroachment to worldwide control.

There are two problems in the matter of the Convention of the Rights of the Child: world government’s plan to barge into the parenting arena and the widespread but mistaken belief that this, or any, treaty replaces the Constitution.

First, the belief that a treaty can change the Constitution: there are only two lawful ways to do so. The Constitution’s Article V describes both; both involve the Senate, House of Representatives and the states. The president is a non-player. A treaty follows a different path: the president originates it and the Senate ratifies it, skipping the House — the legislative body that represents the common people. If a treaty changed the Constitution, the people would have had no say in the change to their government. Because they are the power source behind our constitutional republic, their input is mandatory.

Nonetheless, 60 years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower bullied this political chicanery into practice. Anyone who declares that the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of the Child would supersede the Constitution is either deceptive or ignorant. The latter is a real possibility, since most members of Congress either don’t understand the Constitution or deliberately ignore it, according to washingtontimes.com, which says, “Goofs, shortcuts and misreadings (of the Constitution) abound." Lawmakers who mistakenly believe a treaty predominates would act as such, making it happen.

The second problem is the treaty, itself. The United Nation’s Children’s Fund, (UNICEF) says this treaty is a “universally agreed set of non-negotiable standards and obligations” that our legal system would be required to enforce. Its purpose: “No child should be treated unfairly on any basis.” Governments should “take all available measures to make sure children’s rights are respected, protected, and fulfilled." Governments are to ”ensure that the minimum standards set by the Convention in these areas are being met.” (Do you hear Big Brother knocking?)

The problem: who sets the standards and who defines “unfairly”? An international committee would set the standards for all children worldwide — a right previously given to parents, based on their religious and moral values. This committee would also define “treated fairly” and you would comply with their definition. The treaty declares that children would choose their religion, with parents as advisors, only. Forget unified family worship, parents teaching tiny ones to pray, or the teaching of a common moral standard. What moral standards would prevail? Katie Hatziavramidis, in “Parental Involvement Laws for Abortion in the United States” gives us a glimpse: “Ratification of the (CRC treaty) by the United States holds a strong possibility of assisting minors who seek abortions without parental interference…(to) offer the best hope for securing adolescent reproductive freedoms.” You would likely have to forget about teaching your moral standards to your children.

A child’s right to leisure, as defined by the committee, would be legally enforceable, inviting clashes with the parents’ need to teach work skills and personal responsibility. Some disciplinary practices would be outlawed, further hobbling parents. The treaty also requires that no country could spend more on programs such as defense than on children’s well-being. This would dictate national policies and inevitably expand our welfare state.

Nations who sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child will be required to interpret and enforce its policies on their citizens. Scotland has already complied with the treaty, assigning a government agent to each child in the nation to act as an advocate—a task that has been the role of parents throughout history. In Scotland, under this massive enlargement of the welfare state, parental authority is now secondary to that of the government advocate for the child.

This treaty has arisen under the banner of human rights — a badly misused term. Its incubator is the humanism that denies God and inalienable rights, making individuals pawns to political expediency. It is a massive step toward world government and the sham that says government is God: government giveth, and government taketh away.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child is a classic example of something whose title sounds good but which is remarkably bad, proving that nomenclature and reality are often at odds. This 20 year old treaty is real and very much alive. The Obama administration strongly favors it along with many liberal senators. Only the US and Somalia have withheld acceptance, a matter President Obama says is “embarrassing”.

Many well-meaning organizations, such as Kiwanis and Girl Scouts, support the treaty. They surely do not understand its ramifications. Those who oppose the treaty are profiled as lacking understanding of how human rights treaties work. It is, rather, the opposite — we understand exactly how they work: they take away individual choices. Talk to Utah’s senators and those of other states, and keep your eyes on this treaty. It is bad news.

Monday, December 8, 2014

The Season of United Faith & Love for the Human Family

We Do Not Have Too Many Babies

Population numbers the world over are falling. Social scientists who study demographic issues point to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, which charges onward today, as the culprit. It was the beginning of an era of hedonism — free love and loose morals. In the wake of this revolution, we have falling populations, and economic decline that will not reverse itself until the birth numbers do an about face.
Forty years into population decline, the media and the United Nations wail an opposite message: Overpopulation has us in a death grip and we will all starve. Not even close. Rather than a population explosion, we have a western-world population implosion. Thanks to the baby boomer demographic, we will appear to have population growth for a few decades yet, but when that bubble dissipates, our rapidly declining population will be starkly obvious.

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Health_Concerns/Vaccines/poison_cure/population_control.jpg

To keep population stable, a nation’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) must be 2.1 — each woman, on average, replaces herself and a man with two children, and one woman in 10 has a third child to compensate for infant deaths and higher male births. Without a TFR of 2.1 a nation’s population declines, and with it, as a silent partner, its economy declines, as well. The US Centers for Disease Control reports in its 2010 National Vital Statistics Report that our Caucasian American TFR is currently 1.65, meaning that each Caucasian generation is only ¾ the size of the previous one. At this rate, in five or six generations we are almost gone. This is serious. Babies must consistently be born to continue our race.
America is not alone. According to OZY.com, the world’s population growth rate is now half what it was 40 years ago. Italy has a birthrate of 1.4, where one woman in five of childbearing age is childless. Walk the streets of Italy, which once sported large families, and you rarely see children. Ukraine has a TFR of 1.29 and Greece is 1.39. Japan, however, is the poster child. According to the Population Research Institute of Virginia, Japan is acting out the final stages of the Sexual Revolution — socially acceptable pornography and sex outside marriage with readily available contraception. This has produced a nation-wide “Why marry, why have children?” philosophy. In what is termed the Celibacy Syndrome, 1 in 3 young Japanese do not marry. According to one population expert, “Japan is quietly and comfortably dying.”
Falling birthrates always create a falling economy, for obvious reasons: fewer people to produce and consume. Writing about Europe, Joel Kotkin states in Forbes magazine, May 30, 2012: “Europe’s economic disaster is …largely caused by…a demographic decline”. USA Today, Feb. 13, 2013, says, “There are no cases of peace and prosperity in the face of declining populations.” The Wall Street Journal, in its article titled America’s Baby Bust, Feb. 12, 2012 agrees: human well-being — innovation, investments, conservation — all drop when the population drops. So does a nation’s political power. The WSJ article concludes: “…the only thing that will preserve America’s place in the world is if… Americans…decide to have more babies…we simply must figure out a way to have more babies.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2013/10/birth-rates.jpg&w=1484

Yet we’ve been told there’s a population explosion. Not so, says the Wall Street Journal: “For two generations, we’ve been lectured about…overpopulation…this issue is wrong…the phenomenon of fertility collapse…has spread around the globe”. The article continues, “our fertility rate isn’t going up anytime soon. In fact, it’s probably heading lower. Much lower.” The Central Intelligence Agency website, World Factbook, agrees, “Global fertility rates…are projected to decline dramatically over the next 50 years.” If so, our economic woes will continue, as well.
We have humanists to blame for this decline. They want to drop world population from 7 trillion to 1 trillion or less, according to many sources, including infowars.com. This movement is coming under the bogus bully-banner of sustainable development (Agenda 21, renamed). To accomplish humanists’ goal, a many-pronged campaign has been aimed at Americans who are undereducated on this issue. Utah is currently being targeted through advertising by smallfamilies.us to advance the beliefs of the “me generation” that time with them—the parents—is so valuable that children should forfeit siblings to get it. Utah’s family-friendly state has the highest TFR in the Union—we have more children than any other state. (Rhode Island has the lowest at 1.63) Yet our birthrates have tumbled—from 4.3 in the 1960s to 2.6. (Salt Lake Tribune. July 24, 2005)
Why? As the family has fallen apart, birthrates have dropped. Divorce, deliberate childlessness, single parenthood and same-sex unions all pummel the birthrate. Christian devotion, which teaches that children are a blessing in a home, is on the wane. All these factors have added to the decline. In a vicious cycle, falling birthrates bring economic stagnation which brings falling birthrates to parents who say they can’t afford children.
Those soft, kissable cheeks, gurgling baby sounds and pudgy little legs have a purpose beyond tying grandma’s heart in bows. They are about restoring a nation’s greatness and stabilizing its economy. Our well-being depends on the birth of children, and we do not have too many of them. As a nation, we must reset our social intelligence to focus on encouraging and protecting families that bring children into the world. Anything less puts us in a barren future world of few people and fewer dollars to go around. Babies are the world’s salvation to love, continuity, and economic stability.

In The Constitution

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