[shot_gun_r]

Heh, I was wondering that too. Or why don't the Democraps throw him out of the party?

"Arnold Toynbee who wrote the acclaimed 12 volume A Study of History, once declared, ‘Of the 22 civilizations that have appeared in history, 19 of them collapsed when they reached the moral state America is in today.’"

I wonder how Toynbee explains the fact that Rome fell after it became Christianized? And at the hands of pagan Goths and Vandals . . .

I don't think we want to go into "the right religion equals a powerful society" argument. History isn't really on our side, there. Consider the four Crusades, for instance. By the time they were over, Islam had taken Spain.

[snowman1]

Rome's civilization was in the crapper long before Christianity came along.

[pelagius2]

A minor historical correction:
By 733AD (less than 100 years after the opiated dreams of Mohammed waffed away) the Muslim/Moors had conquered Spain and were stopped at the Battle of Tours.
Between 733AD and 1090AD, Islam had probed and proded at any opening to further European invasions,
The Crusades - starting about 1095AD were a response to these continuing Islamic treats to Europe.
The assualt on Europe continued after the last Crusader are forced out of midEast around 1325AD.
In 1389 (Battle of Kosovo) our valant Serbian brethern along with Vlad the Impaler put a terminal crimp on some of these efforts
A hiatus occurs at the gates of Vienna in 1683AD, until now, 911.
These finatics dont quit. Seems we will have to save Europe's bacon AGAIN.

[JohnCliftn]

Roman Republic fell due to moral decline starting with Sulla and ending Julius Caesar. The Republic is what we would like to emulate, not the Empire. Our Constitution is based on the Constitution of The Roman Republic as understood in 1789, not the Constitutions of any of the Roman Empires. Changes from the Roman Republic's Constitution reflect the English experience with law. The US Constitution

• replaced voting by tribes with voting by States,
• omitted entirely the Tribunes of the People (some may consider city aldermen as performing that role),
• does not make the Chief Executive the High Priest,
• enumerates specifically the powers the US government does have,
• expressly forbids the federal government from usurping powers not enumerated,

but otherwise it is the Constitution of the Roman Republic.

The Toynbee quote refers to the loose morals of the 1920's! Our morals have declined further since then. With no moral foundation we see the Bill Clinton as Chief Executive usurping legislative and judicial powers, Congress usurping powers that ought to be left to the several states, and the Supreme Court usurping powers willy-nilly, as if the powers were not enumerated. We see language becoming meaningless as new definitions are proclaimed for common words that the structure of our government depends upon; words like marriage, right, tax, fee, felon, property, and citizen.

Moral decline does not differentiate sexual behavior from citizenship. Whenever sexual morality declined, so did citizenship, at the same time.

An entirely different issue is the Decline of the Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire was taxed out of existence. The Eastern Roman Empire muddled on.

There's not a Conservative American, as defined in FreeRepublic, that would not fight to the death to prevent establishment of a Roman Empire here in America.