Free Republic

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence? For the record, here's a portrait of the men who pledged "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" for liberty many years ago. Fifty-six men from each of the original 13 colonies signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Nine of the signers were immigrants, two were brothers and two were cousins. One was an orphan. The average age of a signer was 45. Benjamin Franklin was the oldest delegate at 70. The youngest was Thomas Lynch Jr. of South Carolina...

In the American Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers proclaimed that we are endowed by our Creator with the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, we have long forgotten what our Founders meant by that now iconic phrase—“the pursuit of happiness”—and, as a consequence, we are now in jeopardy of losing the very liberty our Founders purchased for us at the risk of their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Indeed, if we properly understood what our Founding Fathers meant by the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” a photographer in New Mexico, a pastry business owner in Colorado,...

The old adage that one lie leads to another is never more apparent than when modern American public officials deal with issues arising from sexual immorality. President Bill Clinton, for example, started a chain of lies when he decided to have an adulterous relationship with a White House intern. Clinton first lied to his wife, then to a federal court, then to the American people. Nor could Clinton's lies, delivered as president, be his lies alone. His partisans in Congress either had to abandon him or add another link to the chain of lies by declaring that perjury and...

It's Holy Week, but what's not so holy is the assault on religious liberty in the U.S. Religious liberty has been called rightly America's "first freedom," not only because the right is contained in the First Amendment but also because it predates the U.S. and has its origin in God, not government, and the freedoms he endowed within us. But over the past few decades, that basic freedom has come under assault -- particularly, in recent years, regarding Christianity. Last week, I discussed how religious liberty in foreign countries is being suppressed. This week, I will begin to address...

Since the 1950s the Longview, Wash. City Council has opened its public meetings with prayer, as Congress has done for 239 years. But fear of a lawsuit from groups like the ALCU has caused the mayor to tell the local ministerial association that it is “not acceptable” for ministers who volunteer to give a Christian prayer that refers to Jesus. To their credit, the ministers refused to give a generic prayer that violates the convictions of their faith. So, for fear of an ACLU threat, city officials decided to exclude ministers simply because their faith teaches them to pray...

In the past few weeks, I've highlighted ways we can reduce violent crime in the U.S. But I've saved the best and most powerful solutions for last because they work from the inside out.In Part 1, I revealed how rational and rewarding it would be to post armed guards at our schools. In Part 2, I showed how reducing the number of firearms in the U.S. would not curb violent crime. In Part 3, I began to discuss the first of two ways in which our Founding Fathers expected to produce and maintain civility and decency in society. They esteemed...

I am in Paris for one afternoon and overnight because the non-stop service from Oujda, Morocco to Dulles International Airport just outside Washington, DC hasn't yet begun. We flew into Orly Airport which is the Newark Airport of Europe. If you can arrange a trip that doesn't include Orly, I recommend you do that. But, any story that ends with, "and then we had dinner in Paris" is a pretty good story. Washington, DC is awash in activity surrounding the President's State of the Union address tomorrow night at nine Eastern time. As we have discussed before, every association, DC-based...

American society’s schizophrenic attitudes about business could be the subject of a book. (Perhaps multiple volumes.) For example, in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, we heard constantly about the need to create jobs and bring down unemployment. And yet, media coverage and Hollywood depictions of business only reinforce the popular fiction that business owners are little more than greedy exploitative bloodsuckers (whose enterprises apparently exist for the sole purpose of being gouged for taxes to be spent by profligate lawmakers with no sense of their own fiscal responsibility). Regrettably, this is typical. But our culture’s conflict...

Who isn't sickened by the moral decay and heinous acts of violence across our country? My heart and prayers continue to go out to victims everywhere. But do gun bans -- such as the one proposed this past week by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., which would outlaw 120 specific firearms -- curb violent crime? Not according to a recent Fox News investigation titled "Assault-weapons ban no guarantee mass shootings would decrease, data shows." The report concluded, "Data published earlier this year showed that while the (Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was signed by President Bill Clinton)...

"Second Term Begins With a Sweeping Agenda for Equality," ran the eight-column banner in which The Washington Post captured the essence of Obama's second inaugural. There he declared: "What binds this nation together ... what makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago." Obama then quoted our Declaration of Independence: "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...

For those of you who didn't catch the tail end of Mark Levin's show Tuesday night, here's what he discussed in the last 5 minutes.(mp3) At the Constitutional Convention, July 17th, 1787, delegate Gunning Bedford of Delaware made the following proposal: Mr. BEDFORD moved that the 2d. member of Resolution 6. be so altered as to read "and moreover to legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union, and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent," or in which the harmony of the U. States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual Legislation."...

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, said: "The British are not coming. ... We don't need all these guns to kill people." Lewis' vision, shared by many, represents a gross ignorance of why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants. Alexander Hamilton: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed," adding later, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents,...

James Madison Drinks, and Writes an ArticlePhilip Freneau had set the deadline for the December 22nd edition of the National Gazette, and James Madison found himself racing the hourglass. Freneau published the newspaper, dedicated to the positions of Thomas Jefferson’s faction within the Congress and the council around His Excellency, while working for the red-haired Secretary of State as a translator. Mr. Jefferson saw neither difficulty nor conflict with this arrangement. Freneau had labeled the men of Alexander Hamilton’s faction as Monarchists, Tories, and Anti-Republicans, claiming their role was to reverse the results of 1776. The Secretary of the Treasury...

Following the tragic shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. by Adam Lanza , many Americans are wondering what exactly our Founding Fathers intended when they set the Second Amendment to paper more than 200 years ago. Surely not the killing of 20 young children and six women.

>Yes, we lost. But I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to say that ACORN stole the election, do you? PPP's first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard...and also declining in numbers. 49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore. Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they...

There’s an old story from the Jewish shetls of Eastern Europe. There was a singing contest among the animals. The Nightingale loses, despite her lovely singing voice. Looking down on the jury, she sees the grunting wild pigs. She weeps, not because she lost, she says. “But see who my judges are!” America must feel like the Nightingale whenever she has to go before a UN panel. I had the honor of serving our country as U.S. Ambassador to the UN’s Human Rights Commission. In those days, the UN body had such worthy respecters of human rights as Algeria, Libya,...

"There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit" - Ronald Reagan I have not had a lot to say in quite a while, and I have explained much of why that is here. Transcribing takes up a lot of time. In addition to the transcription, the other major project that I have been putting time into is getting a speech from one of the Founding Fathers translated into Spanish. I have a full transcript of one of George Washington's speeches up on my Original Sources...

America’s first mega-church, defined as a congregation of 2,000 attendees or more, held services in the capitol building inside the House of Representatives. It remained there until 1868 as the congregation raised money for building a new sanctuary they could call their own. According to the diary of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, church services were also held in the Treasury building and the Supreme Court Building. He describes the Reverend James Laurie, pastor of a Presbyterian Church, that had settled into the Treasury Building, preaching to an overflow audience in the Supreme Court Chamber,...

We, the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. Abraham Lincoln Are we in the United States sovereign individuals? I believe we are according to the U.S. Constitution. The purpose of this treatise is to investigate and expose the principals of not only what it means to be sovereign, but of sovereignty in general and whether the U.S. Constitution actually guarantees the individual sovereign status. This discourse will touch on the differences between republicanism, democracy and the actual make-up of the United...

The Constitution of the United States is much more than just a piece of paper; it is a document written by God fearing men who believed in Liberty and Justice for all who are citizens of this great nation and their Posterity. While the U.S. Constitution is a guide for ourselves and for those who represent us, the U.S. Constitution is much more; it is the “law of the land” and should be viewed as such, as well as considered whenever any of the three branches of government, i.e., Legislative, Executive, or Judicial, enact new laws or perform the duties...