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."
My identity isn't at issue. Look at my homepage, I'm quite candid about who and what I am.
However, I DO have issues with nosy governments in their rush to trample on guaranteed rights that were secured for us all in trhe BoR.
Didn't a nosy government come up with and adopt that bill of rights?
Identity and something reflecting it accurately is the ENTIRE issue of this thread sir.
I asked you a couple of fair questions and I notice you are refusing to answer them. So I will ask one more time.
What kind of ID do you support and in what contexts do you feel an accurate ID is needed?
Am I to take from this post that the answer to that is your homepage on FR?????
Please now, I am about personal security in the area of Identification that is accurate and functional. This extends to National security by adding all people's safety in ID together. Indeed, National security is a by product of what it is I seek. A good by product at that.
Yet again your claim is destroyed as the meaningless spin that it is.
A warrant to ID you? Are you serious? Lets see now, you need an ID to gain a warrant....and you want a warrant to gain an ID? How can you gain a warrant if you do not first establish ID of the person to be searched?
If you cannot see that for what it is then I cannot help you.
I absolutely beleive in innocent until proven guilty. I believe ID helps to prove both and thus approve of it. In this thread I offered the DUKE example. His ATM and the camera's at the ATM prove that he was not at the place of the attack when the accuser said he was there. ID proves innocence and it sure appears you seek to delete that tool.
"so that they can keep track of you" there you go again....use/abuse rather than ID itself.
By this notion you are saying that your SS# is unconstitutional. All Tax ID #'s are unconstitutional for evey business.
Your last paragraph is interesting. That which I advocate removes the very thing you complain about even in the private sector example you cite. Yet you oppose my position.
Just giving what I am getting! But I agree with what you said in this post.
I answered them. I said a state issued DL with no enhancements beyond a pic of my pretty lil' face.
And the purpose of what I answered is to prove I can drive and I'm me.
The rest is nonsense.
And that "But if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" chimera is just that. A chimera.
My liberty is more important than national security. Get it?
Franklin was right....and you are SO wrong.
I probably won't. The comparisonis rather apt--though Hitler will end up looking like a choir boy, relgatively speaking.
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.
Oh, we have been aware for at least a decade or 3 that one of the seeling points was slated to be the convenience and reduction in number of ID's. Nothing new on that point.
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????
Glad to be wrong about you and bureaucracy. Actually, I think we have sufficient means to identify folks accurately currently. Particularly if enforced.
I resent your allegation about fear of personal responsibility. Little could be further from the truth.
Tyranny is not fun. Sloppiness in the bureaucratic system affords more room for innocent folks to escape tyranny a bit longer; enjoy some of their freedom birthright a bit longer.
Conservative human nature wants to see people held to account for their own choices and actions. I am one such person. Are you?
Certainly I prefer to see people held to account for their own choices and actions. But not always or even primarily by the bureaucracy.
1. Families need strengthened to the point that folks are held to account powerfully and decisively within the context of their families and their family values and effective attachments. THAT SINGLE ISSUE would dramatically solve the problem of personal responsibility.
2. For the last 200 years, whenever statistics have been kept, whenever church attendance has increased, crime has gone down. Strengthening the value, viability and practice of Judeo/Christian values would dramatically increase the degree of personal accountability to a far Higher and more thoroughly effective Power than the bureaucracy. Only Holy Spirit searches the intents of the heart and motivates folks to behave according to His standard accordingly.
Bureaucratic based tyranny tends to increase the surface, public conformities that are more obvious. It tends to drive evil, corruption etc. underground, not decrease it. Evidence of Germany, China and Russia would indicate tyranny tends to increase evil dramatically. Personal responsibility gets shredded more thoroughly and more dramatically as folks increasingly blame the rules and the system--often with good cause.
I need an ID for class right? For the grades? Isn't that an abomination? How do I pay for my classes without an ID?
How do they know what account to apply my payment to without ID?
Are you honestly saying that each airline should have its own ID. That each store should? that each bank should? That each and every business shoudl have its own form of ID exclusive to its own business. AND then on top of that have local state and federal ID's needed to function in those areas? All hospitals too?
Just how many ID's do you suggest we carry? Sorry, but I do not want a George Kastanza wallet! ;)
An ID is a paper. A warrantless search of papers offends the Bill of Rights.
A state Issued ID with your picture is a ciolation of rights, they can track you! LMAO.
This form of ID has P R O V E N to be easily faked and you just turn a blind eye to it. You refuse to address that entirely.
I thought a State ID was invasion and violation?? what happened?
Hilarious.l
Warrants are SUPPOSED to be difficult to obtain.
The cops have been doing their jobs just fine arresting criminals since before the days of Jesse James without any ID.
They didn't even have any ID at all back then.
I think that was directed at you equating me somehow with a terrorist when I just wish to retain my privacy and don't wish the federal governmnet to have information on me that's unnecessary AND unconstitutional.
Your liberty is more protected when you have an ID that is exlusive to you and with a DNA attachment how exactly could it be faked?
Your liberty is not protected by a icense with a picture on it today, yet you want exactly that.
You are funny dude.
The state. The state has an obligation, not the fed.
BTW, I could care less if it can be faked.
You just don't cherish your liberty, do you?
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