Free Republic

Interactive painting that symbolizes our country today

Posted by constitutionallyspeaking on September 17, 2009 Today is Constitution Day. It was on this day, September 17, 1787, that the Constitution emerged for the first time from the convention in Philadelphia, Pa. Our blessed Constitution that was written not by men of all the same political faction, however, a coalition of men of many political factions, working together to “Form A More Perfect Union” and it was up to ‘We the People” to ensure its long lasting existence. Fast forward 222 years…

"It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world." ~ George Washington I have written before about the critical need for Congress to reassert its authority over foreign policy, and for the American people to recognize that the Constitution makes no distinction between domestic and foreign matters. Policy is policy, and it must be made by the legislature and not the executive. But what policy is best? How should we deal with the rest of the world in a way that best advances proper national interests, while not threatening our freedoms...

David Barton is the founder of Wallbuilders. He is a brilliant scholar on the true founding of the United States and how ingrained Christianity was in our founders. This is the best video I have EVER seen. He is so detailed and yet succinct, on how we were really founded and who's responsible. The level of black participation in our liberty is astounding and yet, you hear none of it. I speculate that the Al Sharpton's/Jesse Jackson's of this country do not want anyone to hear these truths because it could insite pride in the country from our black population....

I have seen articles posted on FR quoting statements of faith by many of our founding fathers and how it influenced their view of governing. Can someone please post some of the most compelling statements as evidence in how their faith played a vital role in their daily lives? It will be much appreciated.

"A Visitor From The Past"

Indian DNA links to 6 'founding mothers' By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer NEW YORK - Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests. Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists to today in about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said. The finding does not mean that only these six women gave rise to the migrants who crossed into North America from Asia in the initial populating of the continent, said study co-author...

HOW LONG DOES THE USA HAVE? This is the most interesting thing I've read in a long time. The sad thing about it, you can see it coming. I have always heard about this democracy countdown. It is interesting and concerning to see it in print. God help us, not that we deserve it. How Long Do We Have? About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier: 'A...

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's intelligence services are investigating an Islamist Web site that says it is establishing a branch of al Qaeda in Britain, BBC television reported on Tuesday. According to the report, security experts fear a posting on the site, www.alekhlaas.net, declaring "the creation of the al Qaeda organization in Britain" may be genuine. "You don't ignore this sort of thing," Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the British joint intelligence committee, told the program. "It may not be a threat from an existing cell... but it does represent a move in the propaganda game and the propaganda game...

h A revolt in an undeveloped colony on the fringe of civilization, led by a big landowner and slaveholder with little education or military experience, brought to success by help from France in its feud with the British colonizers. That's how a cynical European might have described the American Revolution. Jay Winik's new account of the period takes a different view in American Revolution presented as source of worldwide political changes ever since "The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800" (Harper Collins, 659 pages, $29.95). He feels that history may never have seen a group...

'Celebration' banned for Jamestown's 400thEvents marking settlement's anniversary condemn its 'holocaust' Posted: March 8, 20071:00 a.m. Eastern By Bob Unruh© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com This year is the 400th anniversary of the arrival of settlers in Jamestown, 13 years before the Plymouth Pilgrims appeared on America's shores. And there will be discussions on the environmental impact of the settlement and its impact on African-Americans and Native Americans. But there will be no celebration. "You can't celebrate an invasion," Mary Wade, a member of Jamestown 2007 organizing committee, has stated. After all, Indian tribes "were pushed back off of their land, even killed. Whole tribes...

"We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Virginia Baptists, 1808. ME 16:320 "The constitutional freedom of religion [is] the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights." --Thomas Jefferson: Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes, 1819....

ROCK HILL, S.C. - A research facility is planned for York County that will focus on the role of Southern states in the Revolutionary War. Historian Michael Scoggins said the Southern Revolutionary War Institute will be used to educate people about the South's contributions to the war. It's a field he says has been neglected in the past. "There's been various fields that downplay the role of the South," Scoggins said. "When you look at most history textbooks, we are generally given the short treatment." The institute will be based at the McCelvey Center in York and local officials hope...

 David McCullough was born in 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was educated there and at Yale University. Author of 1776, John Adams, Truman, Brave Companions, The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, The Great Bridge and The Johnstown Flood, he has twice received the Pulitzer Prize and twice the National Book Award, as well as the Francis Parkman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The following is adapted from a public lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 31, 2006, during Mr. McCullough's one-week residency at the College to teach a class on “Leadership and the History...

There is opposition to a plan by Israeli Arabs to march in the center of the Israeli city of Lod to mourn the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation. Residents of Lod filed a request with Lod Police Commander Amichai Eshed to prevent a public observance in the city on May 15th (the anniversary of the end of the British Mandate) of Al-Nakba – which is Arabic for "The Catastrophe," a reference to the founding of the State of Israel. They wrote in their letter that, "Nakba Day testifies more than anything to the disloyalty of Palestinians in Israel to the right...

In 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty, including people from right here in the Marlborough area, dumped tea into Boston Harbor in protest against the British. It was one of the seminal events of the Revolutionary years. So how is that event presented in today's high school history classes?

A common and false impression about America’s Founding Fathers is that they were deists -- that is, they believed in a "watchmaker" God who set the universe in motion and then stepped aside to let it run itself. The deist god lacks the interest, or the power, to intervene in human affairs. Michael Novak, a celebrated theologian and author, convincingly rebutted this misconception in his book, "On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding." In "Washington's God," Novak and his daughter Jana turn their attention to the religious beliefs of America's first and greatest President. The...

Published online: 24 October 2005Charlotte SchubertY chromosomes reveal founding fatherDid conquest and concubines spread one man's genes across Asia? The Manchu warriors took control of China in 1644. © Punchstock About 1.5 million men in northern China and Mongolia may be descended from a single man, according to a study based on Y chromosome genetics1. Historical records suggest that this man may be Giocangga, who lived in the mid-1500s and whose grandson founded the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912. The analysis is similar to a controversial study in 2003, which suggested that approximately 16 million men...

In a more perfect United States there would be a separation of politics and government rather than an illegitimate separation of church and state. The fact that there is absolutely no mention of the latter in the US Constitution hasn’t stopped ideologues and activists from forcing that bit of fiction down our collective throats. Neither has the constitutionally derived authority of We the People thwarted them from hijacking the act of governing for the benefit of politics. I don’t blame those who haven’t a clue as to how our government is supposed to work for their lack of knowledge. US...

In this modern age, when we commemorate the 229th birthday of these United States, we may recite the rightness of our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People...

In a recent Supreme Court decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "If the peasants sow the fields poorly, they should be helped – and this particularly applies to the poor peasants – by means of collective cultivation of the large estates. There is no other way of helping the poor peasants." Therefore, "the landed estates must be confiscated immediately." Actually, that was Vladimir Lenin writing in an issue of the Communist publication Pravda on June 2, 1917. I've compiled a small list of quotes for use in this article, but at times it can be hard to remember who used...

Opinions vary on the topic, between those with religion and those without. They vary between the politically motivated--those who believe in morality based self-governance versus those who seek man’s dominion over men through man-made, man-interpreted and man-enforced laws. They even vary among believers, some of whom believe in an unwritten separation of church and state versus others who believe only in that which was actually written into our Constitution by the founders. If you are looking for a debate, few topics will so readily attract opposition. Is it a question of faith or historical fact? It’s hard to get folks...

It is at this time of the year that some sentimental Americans reflect on the greatness of the Founding Fathers. Albeit, in the face of “political Correctness,” the “pop culture” mindset, and a government school system that has abandoned American history, the numbers who ponder such topics is shrinking. Nevertheless, several profound essays have been written on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and their fates in the wake of that momentous occasion. It is worthwhile to consider just a few from among those perhaps greatest of Americans, how their examples spoke to the nation at its inception, and...

Founding fathers & mothers: How many crossed the land bridge?Contact: Joseph Blumberg blumberg@ur.rutgers.edu 732-932-7084 x652 Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – Programs on the Discovery Channel and PBS have sparked fresh interest in the prehistoric peopling of the New World. Now, for the first time, we have a realistic estimate of how many ancients made that ice age trek across the long-lost land bridge from Asia to become the first Native Americans. Jody Hey, a professor of genetics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, has developed a computational method that uses genetic information...

Educating the Children of Illegal Immigrants By William John Hagan Houston Home Journal (Warner Robins, Perry, GA) May 18, 2005 When the United States finally became a union in 1789, one of the primary concerns of our founding fathers was the preservation of the sovereignty and protection of State Rights. Unlike Britain and Canada, the United States of America embraced a republican form of government rather than an all powerful parliamentary system. The formation of the United States Senate was not a throwback to the Roman Senate, but a unique historical creation which protected States with small populations from domination...

The American Founding as the Best Regime The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty By Harry V. Jaffa Posted May 15, 2002 In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than...

In God We Trust Patriotic Flash Movie Finished and posted just in time for Washington's Birthday! (BTW, it's hard to swallow polls that find Washington ranked as America's 7th greatest president.) The presentation features quotes from Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Henry, Lincoln, Reagan, and more on the subject of God and morality in government. Many of these quotes were taken from their own speeches to the American people as elected officials (sorry ye Newdows and ACLUers of the world)! Enjoy and spread freely! I created two versions--one for high bandwidth (T1, DSL, Cable), and another for those trapped in dialupland....

Tsunami Tyranny On February 2nd, 2005 US President George W. Bush said in his State Of the Union Address: The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom. (1) The attack on freedom in our world has reaffirmed our confidence in freedom's power to change the world. We are all part of a great venture: To extend the promise of freedom in our country, to renew the values that sustain our liberty, and to spread the peace that freedom brings. (2) How can we define...

The founding fathers never envisioned direct election of the president by the people. In the beginning the people voted for state representatives and congressmen. State legislatures selected two men to represent the state in the Senate. Each state legislature selected a man (from anywhere in the country) to be president and another (not from the same state) to be vice president. There was no campaign and no presidential candidate to select his own vice president. These names were given to electors who journeyed to Washington to meet with the electors from the other states. This was the original electoral college....

I've heard liberals express their dismay at all the fuss conservatives make over judicial activism. Some even claim to be unclear about the meaning of the term. Perhaps a recent remark of Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Senate minority leader, will serve as an illustration. Appearing Dec. 6 on Meet the Press, Reid was asked to comment on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a possible replacement for ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist. "I think that he (Thomas) has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written," said Reid.

I was doing reasearch this evening for a debate tournament I am participating in a couple of weeks when I came upon this quote: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." -John Adams It seems to me this just nails the aclu argument about separation of church and state. Here we have a founding father stating that the constitution does not work if the people are not moral and religious. It seems to me we should be using this quote much more often in debates with...

Lame Ducks and New Canucks When I was young, some thousands of my countrymen fled to Canada in order to avoid fighting the evils of communism in a distant land. More than thirty years later, some thousands of liberals are planning to ascend to the Great White North to avoid fighting the evils of conservatism in their own back yard. Although I’m not sure that flight is the proper response to the recent election results, I wish them a swift transition to a land more amenable to their sensitive, pacifistic dispositions and one that will accommodate their rampant Francophilia. Some...

A great man once told us, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”. He spoke with great eloquence in a dark time for our country, of a need for a united front against a great evil in our country. Despite Mr. Lincoln’s shortcomings in his knowledge of the Declaration of Independence, there is great wisdom in him. For a hundred years after, we heeded his words, creating a true American century, grinding great empires of evil to dust. Now we stand at a new crossroads, the great tenets of our country have been obliterated by liberal parasites. We face a...

AMERICA AT THE CROSS ROADS OF HISTORY When the terrorists attacked the United States on September 11th, 2001, it signaled that they were no longer satisfied to only attack US interests outside the United States. It signaled that they felt comfortable enough and were savvy enough to realize that the US is no longer a unified country, ethnically, socially, politically, or spiritually. Some may believe that it never was, and that comes from a lack of knowledge about the country. Of course, there were slaves, mostly black Africans, but there were also white slaves who bought passage to the New...

A Humbling Lesson: Congressman Davy Crockett Learns About Limited Government   In the following, excerpted from the book The Life of Colonel David Crockett (1884) compiled by Edward S. Ellis, the famous American frontiersman, war hero, and congressman from Tennessee relates how he learned -- from one of his own backwoods constituents -- the vital importance of heeding the Constitution and the dangers of disregarding its restraints. Crockett was then the lion of Washington. I was a great admirer of his character, and, having several friends who were intimate with him, I found no difficulty in making his acquaintance. I was...

by Michael Barone Other Articles by Michael Barone Forgetting the Founding Fathers 06/09/04 Are our great universities abandoning the study of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers? It looks like they are. Two of the leaders in colonial- and revolutionary-era scholarship, Bernard Bailyn at Harvard and Gordon Wood at Brown, are being replaced by historians with no apparent interest in the Revolution and the founding. The same happened some years ago at Yale when Edmund Morgan retired. Bailyn, Wood, and Morgan are members of a generation of American historians who have produced a luminous body of scholarship on colonial America,...

In a recent piece of hate mail, I was taken to task for using the term "God-given rights." "GOD doesn't give rights; the CONSTITUTION does," wrote the critic from Surf City, California. Actually, the constitution acknowledges the rights that are established in the Ten Commandments of God. Like Mr. Surf City, Judge Myron Thompson misunderstood the relationship between God and government when he ruled that Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore cannot display the Ten Commandments. In this iconic battle between American values and liberal secularism, every political and social debate that is worth the fight will be won or...

Taxes & Spending Gen. Wesley Clark's New 'Insights' Into U.S.'s Founding by David Freddoso Posted Jun 18, 2003 Text Size: S M L printer-friendly email to a friend Liberals Totally Wrong in Attacks on Prop 13 The Tax Revolt Turns 25 Some Facts About the Federal Deficit It's Not Ideological, Just Sound Economics Maybe you thought you were familiar with the founding documents of the United States: the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers. Well, your understanding is apparently wrong. Gen. Wesley Clark--the man who brought you the debacle in Kosovo--seems to have discovered brand new insights into...

Voluntary Alternatives to Taxation Stuart K. Hayashi Most Americans believe paying taxes is a patriotic duty. Yet this very nation was founded upon people evading taxes in 1776. When individuals don’t pay taxes, the government goes after them with guns, even though they haven’t used force on anyone else. Thus, taxation is an initiation of physical force against the individual’s right to life, liberty and property. Because taxation is forcible extortion, it violates your right to property. If you don’t pay taxes, you can be jailed, hence depriving you the right to liberty. And if tax “evaders” fight tax...

Friday, 10 November, 2000, 18:44 GMTEurope's 10 founding 'fathers' More than 95% of European men alive today are descended from 10 ancient groups of forefathers, according to new genetic evidence. Scientists believe that 80% of European men inherited their Y chromosomes from primitive hunter-gatherers who lived up to 40,000 years ago. The other male ancestors are likely to have been migrants who arrived in Europe from the Near East about 10,000 years ago bringing with them farming technology. The evidence comes from a new study of the male (Y) chromosome, which is passed only from father to son and can...

How Conservatism Guided America's Founding Forrest McDonald Editor's Preview: It was not state weakness, but incipiently totalitarian behavior by unchecked state governments in the years after 1776, that set the stage for the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. National authority must be strengthened; but how? Liberty is secure in the United States today only because Washington, Hamilton, and their conservative allies bested radical ideologues like Jefferson and Madison in the ensuing struggle to shape the U.S. Constitution. Thus John Locke, philosophical father of the latter group, may be a less benign influence on history than is commonly supposed: millenial excesses from...

The Claremont Institute This is the print version of http://www.claremont.org/writings/jaffa90.html. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The American Founding as the Best Regime The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty By Harry V. Jaffa Posted May 15, 2002 In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing...

Pittsburgh YOUNG AMERICANS FOR FREEDOM A Pittsburgh Chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) is forming. Anyone who is a student (high school or college) in the Pittsburgh area is welcome to join. If you want more information feel free to contact Mark Harris - hadmharris@adelphia.net We are hoping to create a strong and active chapter and we will need help, and MEMBERS. So if you are a young Conservative PLEASE check us out. If you don't live around Pittsburgh or are not young e-mail Mark or check out www.YAF.com to see if there is anything you can do.