Posted on 07/09/2004 5:41:30 PM PDT by rhema
Bump for later, serious read.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 ---
"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
Everything we are about, hinges upon this page.
A very sobering article. One tool of all totalitarian movements is to corrupt language to such an extent that no one can be sure what any law means. The purpose is not only to cripple and distort law but to prevent people from thinking. When language is corrupted and people cannot think clearly, the rulers can say anything -- however contradictory or obviously false -- and people will believe whatever they say. Perhaps the word "believe" is inaccurate. People are conditioned to not have the capacity to judge and to beleive or not believe -- they are in a mental haze and will follow the totalitarian leader because they cannot think of an alternative.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, SHALL NOT be construed to DENY OR DISPARAGE others retained by the people."
I would say it was the our founders "intent" that the right to privacy is a right "retained by the people."
The author of the article reveals by his remarks that he has not read Roe v Wade.
The "right to privacy" was formerly acknowledged first in Griswold v Connecticutt in 1963.
In the Roe v Wade decision of 1972 the Supreme Court correctly reaffirmed the right to privacy.
In the same case, the Supreme Court incorrectly did not apply the right to privacy to a fetus until after the "first trimester."
As a staunch strict constructionist of the constitution and a vehement anti-abortionist, I applaud my right to privacy as being acknowledged legally, but wretch in disgust that an embryo, which can only be a human, does not have the same rights "retained by the people" who exist out of the womb.
Memo to Christians: The "right to privacy" does not equal "a right to abortion," only.
You will rue the day when your "right to privacy" is violated by your government when it applies directly to you and the right to privacy does not involve abortion.
Unfortunately, you then will have no ground to stand on to defend that right to privacy constitutionally because for so many years you incorrectly "denied and disparaged" that right "retained by the people" as being only an "abortion right."
Do you want an example?
When the "over population" wackos, sometime in the future, convince a majority of citizens that only certain couples can have children and those designated couples can only a certain number of children. (Sounds like Nazi Germany in the past and China in the present, n'cest pas?)
Do you not think that the "right to privacy" that is "retained by the people" is the right to have the number of children that you and your spouse wish to have versus how few or many children your government says you should have?
What a wanker. All the evidence in the world can be put in front of these people, and they come up with answers like this. It really makes me want to smash their teeth in.
FMCDH(BITS)
I think that is what happened at the tower of Babel....Nimrod started questioning what "is Is" and the cohesiveness of the society began to fall apart...then, the other languages came later.
How do you translate the "right to privacy" into the "right to murder"?
As we know, the word "liberal" used to have the opposite meaning from what it means today. In the nineteenth century, to be a liberal meant that you believed in individual rights, freedom, reason, and justice. I believe John Stuart Mill was credited as the originator of the philosophy.
These days, to be a liberal means you reject reason, support lynch mob "justice", advocate slavery (...of the doctors, for instance), and believe as Hitler and Marx did that the individual must subjugate himself to the collective.
A few nights ago, Alan Colmes was desperately trying to defend Kerry and Edwards' liberal record. He actually said with a straight face, "Liberalism is not a bad thing. Our founding fathers were liberals." Nice try, Alan. I'm sure all your liberal viewers actually believe that, since they reject reason as a tool for living.
And we have a volvo-driving be-ach up here where I live sporting a bumper sticker: "Jesus was a Liberal".
Someday I am going to stop her and ask if Jesus really believed in homosexual marriage and abortion.
Homosexual Agenda Ping - Looks like a good, long read. What do words mean? Do they have anything other than a subjective meaning, especially regarding words in scripture?
I haven't read it yet but will. Is everything open to subjective interpretation? As in, "If you don't like abortions, don't have one"? Or "If you don't like homosexuals recruiting children, don't do it yourself"?
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this pinglist.
In this country, we have the freedom to believe as we like regarding the sanctity of the Constitution. We can believe that it is the most magnificent and timeless blueprint for governance ever devised by the mind of man. Or we can believe that it is an outmoded government design, in need of constant revision, because it was written by nearsighted men who couldn’t see past the eighteenth century.
We also have the freedom to believe that the Bible is the infallible, inspired word of God … or that it is simply a collection of fairy tales … or that it is merely an insidious book, used by controlling people to instill fear and obedience into the masses.
Being allowed to embrace any or all such beliefs is what individual freedom is all about.
But there are a certain few among us who, by virtue of their position, ought not to have the right to such beliefs.
There once was a time when national office holders (especially presidents, senators, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices) believed that the Constitution was the incontrovertible law of the land and that it was their honored duty to uphold it. The words preserve, protect and defend had a tangible, concrete meaning. And that meaning in no way allowed the infiltration of the concepts of edit, assault, and declare obsolete. As a matter of fact, it forbade them.
That someone would seek elected or appointed national office, the prime duty of which is to preserve, protect and defend a document, would consider that document malleable, and every aspect of it interpretable in countless ways, is ludicrous. Why would anyone want to take an oath to protect something whose very definition (and therefore its value) is forever changing?
There once was a time when America’s leaders were (as they should be) a cut above the rest of us. That time is long past (it has been waning for decades, but drew its last breath around 1989). If they were not Constitutional scholars per se, they at least had a working knowledge of the document they were charged to defend, and they were committed to seeing to it that it remained whole, and supreme.
As this article so beautifully observes, those once-upon-a-time strict constructionist leaders, who regarded the Constitution as a sacred trust, for the most part are now viewed as dinosaurs – and dangerous dinosaurs at that. ‘After all, we really don’t know what the Founding Fathers meant. And even when we do know, their intent is secondary to the dictates of our current [immoral, irresponsible] situation.’
To which I say to the dinosaur-phobes, ‘Then go back to private life, where you may hold any Constitution-related belief that you like. Let someone else take your seat – someone who reveres the document he was elected/appointed to defend.’
When those who are entrusted with the defense of ‘sacred’ ground are allowed to defile that very ground, the ground is then neither sacred nor worth defending.
The Episcopal Church USA is practicing the same convenient, duplicitous behavior. Its leadership (especially, and certainly, at the level of bishop) used to accept a certain unequivocal level of responsibility and allegiance to the sanctity of scriptural doctrine. Again, why would one choose to minister to others a theology that is not considered immutable, but changeable according to the whim of man?
As regards the scriptural description of God’s view of homosexuality (which these ‘ministers’ choose to pretend doesn’t exist between the covers of the Bible), nowhere in the Bible is there any evidence of God’s condoning it. And there are many examples of His declaring it an abomination in His eyes (Lev 18:22, Rom 1:27, and 1Cor 6:9,10 being the most frequently cited). His condemnation of homosexual behavior is explicit and not open for interpretation, except by those who choose irrational distortion over reality.
If the Lord judges homosexuality as an abomination in humankind in general, how much more of a sin must it be to be practiced by a minister of His word? And how can one preach that which one defiles?
James 3:1 reads: Not many of you should be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. Scripture tells us that the Lord holds teachers to a higher standard than others, because they are expected to have a thorough knowledge of their subject, an allegiance to it, and an unwavering dedication to imparting it without tarnishing its truth by infecting it with their own personal biases or desires.
And when the subject is the word of God, and the ‘teacher’ is a minister of the gospel, assessing the word of God as if it were malleable, revisable by man, and not timeless but dependent on human era or situation, that minister needs to retire to the public sector, where such beliefs are his right and privilege.
One of the primary reasons so many of our institutions are eroding and decaying beyond recognition (government and church sitting highest on the list) is that those in decision-making positions of power no longer remain true to the foundations of those institutions whose purity and integrity they are charged to defend.
The dismantling of the Constitution, and the ignoring or interpretational editing of scriptural doctrine, amount to the corruption of words whose sources are pure and well-conceived, in order to justify self-absorbed, irresponsible human behavior. And if we continue to allow government and church leadership to chip away at those timeless (and, in the case of scripture, divinely-inspired) documents and doctrines, we will find ourselves sailing in dark waters … without anchor or compass. And then we had better hope (having forfeited our right to pray) for a storm-free future.
~ joanie
You write beautifully, and here, especially, I am so grateful, because you have written a timeless gem.
A friend lately asked me, how did I think that we could end wars. "I just want to stop the killing." Me, too.
She asked that in the context of, as liberals are want, their notion that wars happen because people like war, people ("militarists") want war, and that if we pursue peace, if we only would, there will be peace.
I told her that warfare is a basic human institution; it may even be a basic human condition; that, the best we can do, is keep it to a dull roar.
Unfortunately, as usual, the time limit for her listening to me, expired ...
I'd like to have continued:
To have peace, we must have a system of justice that the people have sovereign power over at all times. We must adhere to the rule of law. We must preserve the keystone of this system, its constitution. We must amend it only by the procedures that we have agreed upon. We must not bend the words to mean other than their original intent.
Wars happen most because original intent is violated. The grounds upon which we agreed to live in peace, are not maintained. In effect, peace treaties are broken.
There are many reason why they are broken, yet wars start over the attending disagreements.
It's that simple.
Our Constitution is a peace treaty.
Good words. All true.
I like your new and improved FR profile page too, especially the new tribute to Reagan.
Me, too.
The only trouble with the profile page is I never heard of any of the highbrow music. The rest is awesome. :-)
Thank you, Chuck. There will never be another like him.
Yes. Brilliantly stated.
Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document - the Constitution - which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments - unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions - demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built.--Ayn Rand, "Censorship: Local and Express." 1982
Thoughtful and beautiful post, as always, Joanie.
(Thought you might like the read ahadams2, if you hadn't seen it.)
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