The Union's Plan on Election Day

America’s founding document tells us that our rights are endowed to us from the Creator. If we believe these words, then we must conclude that the Emancipation Proclamation gifted freedom to no one. Furthermore, our freedom of speech was not granted by the First Amendment and no law grants us the right to not be murdered.

Our existing liberties may have been captured in the Bill of Rights. But they existed before the North American Continent was ever visited by modern humans. And if any of the first four constitutional amendments were to be repealed by majority vote, the right would yet exist. The Constitution, laws, and the courts are essential to realizing our liberties, but not in granting them.

When law enforcement or the court gets it wrong, our rights have not diminished. Rather, the officer or the judge is for that moment out of alignment with the Creator’s intent for the people. This is what the Declaration describes as “a design to reduce them under absolute despotism.”

There are many areas of life where we voluntarily surrender some liberty in exchange for something greater. We exchange our time for a paycheck, frankness for relationships, and licentiousness for religious beliefs. But lately, I have been observing the odd behavior of masses of free people willing to exchange precious liberties for the gratification of another man’s supremacy.

Of course, we think of slavery as the ultimate despotism. Over 600,000 people died in the struggle to realign the nation with the Creator’s intent for the liberty of enslaved Africans. It is one of our nation’s greatest shames that the majority of black Americans continues to surrender their freedoms to the masters of a ruling leftist government. I ascribe to the theory that generations of slavery weakened the role of fathers in the black community. And the Democratic Party ruthlessly takes advantage of these Americans who deserve every dignity and respect.

Obamacare is the contemporary example of free people gleefully surrendering their freedoms for the indulgence of an ambitious ruler. Everything about this law is deplorable, from the technological embarrassment to the destruction of the health insurance industry to the diminished quality of care– all built on a foundation of monumental political deception. The only, and I mean only, reason to persist in implementing the evocatively named Affordable Care Act is to please Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and their benefactors. Every other American will be hurt by it.

But perhaps the most intricate symbiotic dependency is teachers unions. In several states next week, boards of education will be elected to represent their communities. The issues, as usual, include education funding, priorities for spending, curricula, and parental choice.

One would think that teachers would generally value individual recognition and compensation. And one would be wrong. The culture of public education has a well-established system of relying on public funding while rebuffing public involvement.

Here is how it works: The union promotes their own slate of candidates for election to the school board. The union negotiates collective bargaining contracts with its newly elected friends on the school board. The board hires district leadership that cooperates with the union’s liberal education agenda. The district collects union dues from the teachers to fund both the union and the next board of education election.

Thomas Jefferson declared the high purpose of public education in A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge while serving as a United States Senator in 1779: "The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny] are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that ... they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes."

But rather than warning students about the dangers of surrendering liberty for the comfort of a master, teachers generally consider union membership as a warm blanket. There are many laudable exceptions, of course. But free-market minded educators are usually made to fear the royal order of labor. And the consequence of shunning by their peers is a very real threat.

So the cycle is a difficult one to break by the paying customer. Citizens who are looking for innovation in preparing their students to thrive in capitalism are not finding much empathy from the foreign culture that operates in the neighborhood cinder block building. Our teachers work hard and they generally provide the best education that their 1940’s model can produce. But any attempt by a community to interfere in their terrarium will be met with a very effective use of free-market media.

What the writer calls the "culture of public education" became the primary arm of the former "liberal"--now self-described as the "progressive" movement several decades ago. One now can see what that was such an important move which went largely unnoticed by "the People" who should have guarding the gates of freedom in their local communities.

Now, however, the leaders of that "culture" were, themselves, victims of the "progressive" powers which removed the teaching of America's founding ideas of liberty from the textbooks in schools and universities. Thus, a cadre of willing participants in liberty's potential demise.

Thank you!!

The following is excerpted from a series entitled, "Lessons on Liberty," originally distributed as a publicity piece for "Our Ageless Constitution" & "Rediscovering the Ideas of Liberty."

The "Lesson" contrasts the Founders' Ideas of Liberty" which were intended by the Founders to be taught to rising generations, with the Counterfeit Ideas being promoted in the so-called "public schools" of America for decades.

IDEAS OF LIBERTY:
(from America’s Founders and Presidents)
“The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” (Jefferson - 1774)
“Statesmen may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone which can establish the principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.” (John Adams - 1775)
“The Sacred Rights of Mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” (Alexander Hamilton)
“Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first and the most basic expression of Americanism. Thus the founding fathers saw it, and thus, with God’s help, it will continue to be.” (Dwight Eisenhower)
“The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe, the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” (John F. Kennedy - 1961 Inaugural)
“…it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly implore His protection and favor….”(George Washington)
“Now the virtue which had been infused into the Constitution…and was to give it…the stability and duration to which it was destined, was no other than…those abstract principles…proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—namely, the self-evident truths of the…unalienable rights of man…the…sovereignty of the people, always subordinate to a rule of right and wrong, and always responsible to the Supreme Ruler of the universe for the rightful exercise of that sovereign…power.” (John Quincy Adams, on the occasion of The Jubilee of the Constitution - 1839)

"Today, across our nation, we see consequences of decades of gross neglect and outright censorship of the Founders’ ideas from textbooks and from our public discourse. We have allowed counterfeit ideas to dominate the public square, and the Founders’ principles have been crowded out. Unwittingly, many teachers and other unknowing officials have participated in the agenda of an unelected mind-controlling elite whose tyrannical actions have robbed generations of Americans from reading or studying the ideas that made America free.

"Like termites, they have eroded our foundations as effectively as if they had burned the books. Yet, not once have they been willing to call it by its rightful name—censorship. Once, in America, stifling ideas about the Creator and Creator-endowed liberty was considered unthinkable. . . .

"The ideas of liberty must be passed on from generation to generation if liberty is to survive. These ideas, when they are allowed to be examined freely, will prevail, because their appeal is to reason and to the love for liberty that is deep in the human heart. John Adams warned: “The people of America now have the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number…if they betray their trust, their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of Heaven.”

COUNTERFEIT IDEAS:
(from some of those whose views have dominated national educational policy)
“The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted society. The true root of liberty, equality and culture is atheism.” (Karl Marx)
Our thinking is enlightened “in the degree in which we cease to depend upon belief in the supernatural.” (John Dewey, father of ‘progressive education’ and 1st President of American Humanist Society)
“…democracy is a human faith and movement, unencumbered by supernatural preconceptions.” (John Childs, a protégé of John Dewey at Columbia)
“…the majority of our youth still hold the values of their parents, and if we do not alter this pattern, if we do not resocialize ourselves to accept change, our society may decay.” (John Goodlad, 1971 Report to President, Schooling for the Future)
“As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially a faith in the prayer-hearing God, who is assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith.” (Humanist Manifesto II, 1973)
“…the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends to lead toward elimination of religious superstition.” (Paul Blanshard, The Humanist, March-April, 1976)
“It [the Nat’l. Education Association’s publication list] includes the delegitimizing of all authority save that of the state, the degradation of traditional morality and the encouragement of citizens in general and children in particular to despise the rules and customs that make their society a functional democracy. The NEA is drifting into exceedingly dangerous waters, and probably carrying more than a few teachers and pupils with it.” (Chester E. Finn, Jr., Ass’t. Sec. Of Education & Prof. Of Education & Public Policy, Vanderbilt Univ., 1982)
--------------

“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines which conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence…let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountains whose waters spring close to the blood of the Revolution.” (Abraham Lincoln)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.