Posted on 05/05/2006 7:21:22 AM PDT by churchillbuff
Is the national ID card the next step toward the imposition of the biblical "mark of the beast" Christians believe will be required to buy and sell during the Last Days?
That's the contention of a growing group of believers who are working to turn back the approval of the Real ID Act by Congress last year. Public Law 109-13 requires the national ID portion of the plan go into effect by May 2008.
"There is a prophecy in the Bible that foretells a time when every person will be required to have a mark or a number, without which he or she will not be able to participate in the economy," states the Christian website NoNationalID.com. "The prophecy is 2,000 years old, but it has been impossible for it to come to pass until now. With the invention of the computer and the Internet, this prophecy of buying and selling, using a number, can now be implemented at any time. Has the time for the fulfillment of this prophecy arrived?"
The site asks visitors to sign an online petition vowing not to vote for any candidate who does not commit to repealing the Real ID Act.
The goal, states the site, which is sponsored by Endtime Ministries, is to get 100,000 signatures on the petition.
On the site is a link to purchase a DVD entitled "666 – How Close? Will the National ID Become the Mark of the Beast?"
Americans choosing not to carry a national ID, the site warns, will be prohibited from driving a car, boarding a plane, train or bus, entering any federal building, opening a bank account, or possibly from holding a job.
"This is probably our last chance to head off the mechanism before it is actually implemented as the mark," states the site in the FAQ section. "It truly may be now or never."
The Real ID Act requires states to participate in a federal data-sharing program when issuing driver's licenses, making those licenses de facto national ID cards.
Touted as a tool of the war on terrorism, the ID card provision of the law, which also includes border-security measures, has attracted the most negative attention.
After May 11, 2008, "a federal agency may not accept, for any official purpose, a driver's license or identification card issued by a State to any person unless the State is meeting the requirements" specified in the Real ID Act. While states can issue non-federal ID cards, they would not be accepted by the Transportation Security Administration for travel purposes, grounding those who don't carry federally approved cards.
The data required to be included in each card are, among other things, the person's full legal name, date of birth, gender, driver's license number, a digital photo, the person's address and machine-readable technology so the information can be ready easily by government or banking personnel.
Each state must agree to share the data on the cards with every other state.
Supporters of the law say it does not require a "national" ID card because each state issues its own cards, not the federal government. But detractors note the cards are virtual national IDs since the federal law has dictated what data must be included and that each state must share its database with the others.
The New Hampshire Senate yesterday voted to reject a bill to rebel against the Real ID system and not participate in a pilot program for which the state had been tapped. The state House of Representatives passed the measure last month, but the Senate instead voted to study the driver's license requirements.
U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., is urging his home state to give Real ID a try, saying it's needed to keep terrorists and illegal aliens from entering the country.
According to the Manchester Union Leader, Gregg argues that New Hampshire residents will find it difficult to get on airplanes or enter federal buildings if New Hampshire doesn't embrace Real ID.
Groups opposed to the Real ID Act are making strange bedfellows, with Christians like those running NoNationalID.com fighting on the same side with the American Civil Liberties Union, which sponsors the website RealNightmare.org.
The ACLU site decries the fact that a motor vehicles department staff person will be required to ask for immigration-status papers from those applying for driver's licenses.
"REAL ID will inevitably cause discrimination against U.S. citizens who may 'look' or 'sound' foreign to a DMV bureaucrat," states the site. "REAL ID requires DMV employees to decide whether someone is a citizen or foreigner before issuing a driver's license. The law demands that DMV bureaucrats distinguish among citizens, permanent resident immigrants and other non-citizens in deciding who is eligible for a license and what type of license may be issued.
"Based on past experience when similar requirements were imposed on employers, widespread discrimination resulted against citizens who 'looked' or 'sounded' foreign."
The civil-liberties group also slams a requirement of the law that some immigrants be issued a temporary "tier-two" license that has a prominent expiration date.
U.S. governors also have come out against the law, saying it is a huge unfunded mandate imposed on the nation's states.
The National Conference of State Legislatures is equally opposed to the Real ID Act, saying, "Federal legislators and rule makers are negating state driver's license security efforts, imposing difficult-to-comply-with mandates and limiting their flexibility to address new concerns as they arise. In other words, decades of state experience is being substituted for a 'command and control regime' from a level of government that has no driver's license regulatory experience."
Endtime Ministries' Irvin Baxter, a radio host, believes the national ID is a precursor to the forced embedding of radio-frequency chips under the skin.
Baxter told the Concord, N.H., Monitor: "That's where we are headed right now. The prophecy states that you will have to receive a mark on your hand or in your forehead."
The simple act of providing an accurate ID is hardly a violation of a right. I would offer to you that tracking each citizen is a use or abuse of the ID depending on the specific action you speak of within its context and that is very different than the ID itself.
Very much like people attempt to cloud the issue of the ID as opposed to its use/abuse many like to say undocumented migrant worker instead of illegal alien. It seems to me that people like to oppose the ID itself rather than the use / abuse of it and pretend that these two things are one in the same, when they clearly are not.
Privacy means that you are immune to ID? I do not buy that for a minute.
Does that mean any use of your ID is ok? No I do not offer such an idea. You ,like others, are mixing the ID itself with its uses/abuses.
Protecting your ID from abuse is a good thing. Are you claiming this cannot be done except by eliminating ID alltogether? Sure sounds that way if you think the fourth (or any other) was adopted to keep ID totally secret.
I cannot speak for you firend, but I am not on a path to jail or a life as a felon. Life is about choices and consequences for them, accept that and move on.
Lookie here, an attempt to spin. How exactly is one guilty or innocent of their own identity?
This isn't a guilty or innocent issue and it is spin to say what you did. Your Identity is what it is and an accurate ID is simply a representation of that reality.
Like others you are confusing the use/abuse of the ID with the ID itself. An honest argument can be made about use/abuse of an ID. Currently, abuse runs rampant with the ID's we have. You oppose a more accurate ID even though it is a great step forward to solving the problemns we have today.
How about losing the opposition without solution and actually pose an idea to fix what it is you claim to actually oppose? That being abuse of ID in the past, today and moving forward.
Are you going to say that ID abuse improves when noone can ID anyone else? HA HA HA if you do I will just laugh!
So then, how do you pose we move forward in area's of identifying criminals and stopping abuses such as ID theft?
Oh PLEASE! Give up the Hitler stuff OK???
As I have said on this thread I am not advocating augmentation with another ID, I pose replacing the OH SO MANY ones we have today with one standard ID used for many processes. This is reduction not augmentation. This is about eliminating redundnacy and improving productivity.
Your claim that I want "increasingly powerful and intrusive bureaucracy" is simply false. I want less intrusiveness in that my ID will notbe stolen AGAIN! I do not seek any more power for an ID than it deserves, that being the act of properly identitfying its owner accurately. Are you really against such a thing? If so, WHY? Afraid of personal responsibility are we????
Conservative human nature wants to see people held to account for their own choices and actions. I am one such person. Are you?
That's exactly the problem. One really want's the converse. In your version, the card is what counts, not the person.
What makes you think that your DNA is the only failure point in the ID system?
Oh yes, our military and our industry is the problem......FFS!
Tony Blair said it best when he said something along these lines when referring to Abu Graib. It is impossible to be perfect. Some people will do bad things and that is unstoppable. The measure of a nation ( or a persons) worth is not in the lack of perfection in avoiding such things, it is measured by what is done about it when it eventually does happen.
Applied to this context, it is not the ID that people are so against, even though they pose it that way. It is the abuses they are against. I stand with those folks as to abuse but I differ with you and them on this point. ID abuse is happening today. It can be dealt with far better than it is today with a far more accurate form of ID replacing the redundant ID's we have today that are easy to forge.
Lack fo perfection is not failure. Lack of doing possible things to make the situation better IS!
Saying that possible 'what if" abuses could happen as the reason to oppose is fine if all you seek to offer is opposition. To qualify that opposition as valid one must offer an alternative along side that opposition. Without doing so, folks might just as well join the democratic party because that is the politics they practice....opposition without alternative solution hinging on the worst case "what if's" while ignoring the tangible benefits of that which they oppose.
So then when a police officer pulls you over in traffic are you comparing him/her to Hitler? Sure sounds like it.
Hitler's intent was to weed out a section of people based on their ethnicity for destruction.
The intent of ID today here in this nation is far far far from such a thing. The intent today is to seperate those that abide by the law from those that do not.
Will you now compare the rule of law and adherence to it akin to "papers please"???? Sheesh!
If god made you a unique individual why would he want that fact to be hidden?
Do you use your State issued ID to GET that bank account? Think on that one for a minute OK.
You can keep your isolationism to yourself.
If all people have always and always would follow your line of thinking their would not be an America or an American government for you to target as your enemy. Thus there would be nothing for you to isolate yourself from to begin with. Such logic you employ!
Better read the thread man. You have labeled me over and over and over.
This card is akin to the race card. TRITE to the point of uselessness and when a REAL abuse is claimed it will go unheard of.
How about getting real with this debate. How about you stick with the use abuse OF the ID rather than simple opposition of the ID itself. Better yet offer up an alternative to a true peice of identification that will solve the prblems that todays layers of useless ID's presents. Keep in mind now your alternative has to allow function in today's world.
Even you have to admit that there is a need for identification in today's world right?
Almsot seems like you are anarchist by the way you write.
Is any law you do not personally agree with labeled as abusive? Are laws against sexually exploiting children out of bounds and simply seeking to control people?
Contrary to your assumption, my god is the rule of law formed by a government that is by the people for the people of the people. In order to prosecute the laws made one must be able to accurately identify each individual as their own person. I seek to avoid mistakes in that prosecution by accurately identifying each person.
To say that an ID removes liberty is the REAL straw man argument here. You have ID in your wallet right now is your liberty gone? Pure Foolishness!
Simple and well said, thank you!
WWTJD...What would Jefferson do?
WWMD.....What would Madison do?
WWFD.....What would Franklin do?
If they were against it, (and the readings of Madison's explanation of the Sixth Amendments make it quite clear he was against this sort of thing.), then so am I.
And NO ONE alive today, least of all you or me, is as brilliant as these men were. We have no right to alter their visions...for any reason.
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