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Ruth Bader Ginsburg vs. the Declaration of Independence. By Edward Whelan Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently gave a speech defending the Supreme Court's increasing use of foreign law in support of its rulings on the meaning of the Constitution. The title of her speech — "'A decent Respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind': the Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication" — nicely encapsulates the core flaws in her position.

From where do your rights come? Not the right to bear arms, or freedom of the press. I’m talking about those unalienable rights our founding fathers spoke of: Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. At face value, it’s quite a simple question; who, or what, gives you these rights? It seems to me there are two possible answers, God or government. Though it seems like a simple question, the implications of either answer are quite severe. Either your rights come from an objective, unchangeable higher authority, or a manmade power with the potential for corruption. The danger in assuming that...

What were the original principles of the American Constitution? Are those principles true? Many historians and political scientists write about the first question. Scholars are never shy about telling us what happened in the dead-and-gone eighteenth century. But few of them think it is even worth discussing whether the Founders' principles are true. For example, in a review of my book Vindicating the Founders, historian Joseph Ellis accuses me of having committed "sins of presentism." My error, as he cleverly puts it, is believing "that ideas are like migratory birds that can take off in the eighteenth century and land...

HOUSES OF WORSHIP Faith and the Fifth Grade Did a California school ban the Declaration of Independence? Not quite. BY NAOMI SCHAEFER REILY Friday, March 25, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST Many of us remember the headline, "Declaration of Independence banned from classroom." Just before Thanksgiving, the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit against the Cupertino, Calif., school district and issued a press release with that claim at the top--and all hell broke loose. Talk radio and TV rushed to the aid of Steven Williams, a public-school teacher and professed Christian who had apparently suffered religious discrimination at the hands of a...

Under intense global pressure, the United States on Friday dropped its demand to amend a declaration reaffirming the U.N. blueprint to achieve equality for women, saying it was satisfied the document did not guarantee the right to abortion. U.S. Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey said the United States would join other nations in approving the declaration endorsing the 150-page platform for action adopted at the 1995 U.N. women's conference in Beijing. The proposed U.S. amendment would have reaffirmed the Beijing platform and a declaration adopted with it - but only "while reaffirming that they do not create any new international human rights,...

To the citizens of the United States of America, in the light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new Prime Minister (The Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a Minister for America without...

February 10, 2005 North Korea Says It Has Nuclear Weapons and Rejects Talks By JAMES BROOKE TOKYO, Feb. 10 - In a surprising admission, North Korea's hard-line Communist government declared publicly today for the first time that it has nuclear weapons. It also said that it will boycott United States-sponsored regional talks designed to end its nuclear program, according to a North Korean Foreign Ministry statement transmitted today by the reclusive nation's wire service. Pyongyang said it has "manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's undisguised policy to isolate and stifle" North Korea, and that it will...

Here, you can download FREE mp3s of important U.S. historical documents read aloud to burn onto CD and listen to while you're on-the-go. They were generated using the free text aloud software, Speakonia, which sounds like Stephen Hawking. If you can tolerate the sound of the computer voice, then this should be a useful web page for you.

I watch in amazement, as Liberals in America once again call upon our government to “pull-out” of Iraq, leaving the Iraqi people to fend off terrorists on their own and I can’t help but notice the hypocrisy and ignorance of history in their chant… I thought liberals were the kinder, gentler Americans, always concerned with standing up for the down-trodden, looking after those in the world who are unable to care for or defend themselves? It appears their humanitarian zeal includes whales and seals, but not the people of Iraq… Though seemingly appalled at the abusive acts of a few...

2005 SESSION 05-0002 05/01 HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION 1 A RESOLUTION urging Congress to withdraw the United States from the United Nations. SPONSORS: Rep. Albert, Straf 1; Rep. Matthew Quandt, Rock 13; Rep. Hawkins, Hills 18; Rep. Buhlman, Hills 27; Rep. Headd, Rock 3; Sen. Boyce, Dist 4; Sen. Roberge, Dist 9 COMMITTEE: State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs ANALYSIS This resolution urges Congress to withdraw the United States from the United Nations. 05-0002 05/01 STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Five A RESOLUTION urging Congress to withdraw the United States from the United Nations. Whereas, the...

  May Christian Teachers Teach the Declaration of Independence?  Bill Becker of Schwartz & Janzen, who has filed a brief with our John Eastman, Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence on the LA County Seal case, discusses religious liberty, in the recent Williams case involving the Cupertino school district. The district had forbidden him to distribute American political documents, including the Declaration of Independence, on the grounds he was using the documents for purposes of religious indoctrination. The article appears in today's Daily Journal, the legal newspaper for Los Angeles.  School District Should Teach Nation's Vaunted Christian Principles...

England's Notice of Revocation of Independence, 3 November 2004 To the citizens of the United States of America, In the light of your failure to elect an acceptable President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchial duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new prime minister (The Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP (for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside...

Conservatives and other normal people can politely note all we want that the Founding Fathers quite deliberately intended a benevolent and providential Creator to be at the heart of our concept of liberty and of law, and Leftists will not budge one inch as long as compliant judges conspire with them to treat the faithful majority like the Cossacks treated the Russian people under the last Romanov. A minority, a distinct minority, of Americans believe that God should be driven out of any school or civic activity. Those who maintain that the language in the foundational document of the American...

Democratic strategists keep holding post-election powwows aired on C-SPAN, but their introspection never adds up to very much. They usually end up saying in one form or another: we need to fool people better. At some level they know that the problem the party faces is not that the American people don't understand their positions but that they understand them too well. So what options are they left with? Since changing philosophy is out of the question in their minds they are left with changing their rhetoric: let's make the American people think we're revising our radical views without actually...

This approach would force students to study American history without consulting the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, every inaugural address, the bulk of writings by America's founders and much more. Taken to further extremes, it would deprive Stevens Creek students knowledge of the Roman Empire from Constantine on, the Crusades, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, most of the greatest artwork before the 20th Century, the oevre of English-language authors from Chaucer through Eliot (C.S. Lewis no doubt is strictly forbidden!), and the musings of great scientists who to this day puzzle over the existence of G-d. The result: a curriculum that...

By now, most of you know that I'm not that much of a sports fan. I watch maybe one football game a year. Not a whole one, mind you, just a minute here, 30 seconds there, as I'm flipping channels between Food Network, Animal Planet, Adult Swim and Fox News. I'm not all that fussed about basketball, except when a fight breaks out of course, and I can't be bothered too much with hockey except when a fight doesn't break out. Being an American citizen and a male of the species, however, it is expected that I give a rat's...

On Dec. 5, Alan Keyes spoke at the Grace Baptist Church in Decatur, Illinois, and made the following remarks about the place of the Declaration of Independence in America's schools. Keyes was responding to the recent controversy surrounding a California teacher's use of the Declaration in his American history class. ALAN KEYES: Someone was mentioning to me that there is a school district now in America where they will no longer teach the Declaration of Independence to the students. Why? Because it mentions God. This notion that there must be separation of church and state--you can’t pray, you can’t mention...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Click on the link for the first eight pages of the lawsuit filed by Stephen Williams, the teacher who has been banned from handing out the Declaration of Independence and other historical documents that contain "religious content" in his fifth grade class. According to the suit, Williams is the only teacher who must restrict his handouts to a list authorized by the principal. He alleges that she requires him to do this because she knows that he is an orthodox Christian.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California teacher has been barred by his school from giving students documents from American history that refer to God -- including the Declaration of Independence. Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San Francisco Bay area suburb of Cupertino, sued for discrimination on Monday, claiming he had been singled out for censorship by principal Patricia Vidmar because he is a Christian.