I believe we all ought to commit ourselves, privately or openly, with or without formal oaths, to bearing "allegiance to scraps of paper". Those "scraps of paper" are all that stands between us and tyranny.
You assume everyone wishes to defend the Constitution, which isn’t in evidence. Obviously if we want to keep it we must actively defend it and not rely on hollow legislate. What really killed the Constitution, assuming as I do it no longer has the force of law, though, was an ideological shift from relative laissez-faire to progressivism. So it was not the scrap of paper itself, no, but how people esteemed it, or didn’t.
This points rather to Natural Law as what to which we must pledge our allegiance. Pledging allegiance to the Constitution stinks to me of idolatry. Should we wish to hold politicians to the Constitution, it might be better to do so through promoting Natural Law, partly which the positive law of the Constitution embodies.
By the way, when I asked why we occasionally pretend to still be an oath taking culture, the answer I believe is social control. Oaths are necessary for hierarchical societies. Your betters, ones in a higher caste, pledge to defend you, and you pledge to obey them. This arrangement persists in certain aspects of our civilization, for instance the family, churches, various clubs, etc. But it has nothing to do with the relation of citizen to government in the contemporary U.S.
You assume everyone wishes to defend the Constitution, which isn’t in evidence. Obviously if we want to keep it we must actively defend it and not rely on hollow legislate. What really killed the Constitution, assuming as I do it no longer has the force of law, though, was an ideological shift from relative laissez-faire to progressivism. So it was not the scrap of paper itself, no, but how people esteemed it, or didn’t.
This points rather to Natural Law as what to which we must pledge our allegiance. Pledging allegiance to the Constitution stinks to me of idolatry. Should we wish to hold politicians to the Constitution, it might be better to do so through promoting Natural Law, partly which the positive law of the Constitution embodies.
By the way, when I asked why we occasionally pretend to still be an oath taking culture, the answer I believe is social control. Oaths are necessary for hierarchical societies. Your betters, ones in a higher caste, pledge to defend you, and you pledge to obey them. This arrangement persists in certain aspects of our civilization, for instance the family, churches, various clubs, etc. But it has nothing to do with the relation of citizen to government in the contemporary U.S.
Consider what happens when the Marxists, socialists, and Communists succeed in using massive vote fraud to subvert the U.S. Congress and state governments to repeal the Second Amenddment and other key protections in the Constitution, and you have already demanded U.S. Citizens to take an oath of allegiance to the altered Constitution? Without the oath of allegiancee to the perverted constitution a Citizen might be denied the right to vote, hold political office, hold a firearms permit, possess firearms, hold a driver’s license, receivee equal protection in public healthcare insurance programs, receive food stamps, receive social security benefits, travel on airlines or passeenger trains, serve in the amred forces, serve in any public employment, own real estate, maintain financial accounts in a public bank, and worse. These kinds of consequences occured in Hitler’s NAZI regime, and the oath of allegiance to the person of Hitler was used in part to implement such measures. Enemies of the present U.S. Constitution could do so as well by altering the Constitution and then demand the oath of all U.S. Citizens. A precedent of sorts already esicts to some extent with the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892. Bellamy was a socialist who also played a role in the socialist subversion of the American educational systems and socialist indoctrination of young students. Much of the Marxist, socialist, and communist destruction of the culture of the United States is attributable in part to the efforts of Francis Bellamy. He designed the Pledge of Allegiance to be a means of reddirecting loyalties away from the the loyalties betweeen the band of brothers protecting and defending the personal liberties of each other to a loyalty towards a government, a flag, and a constitution that could become perverted against its original purposes.
Be careful, my friends, lest you ultimately get far more consequences from an oath of allegiance or pledge of allegiance exactly contrary to what you thought you had bargained for. Remember always, any tool efffective for a good purpose can be perverted to use for an evil purpose by evil minded people.