Separation of Church and State? Not when it comes to Christian Charity!

Those who would like the government to stay out of church affairs, beware invoking Christ’s teachings to justify government charity. If it is good enough to use the Bible to dictate that we should care for the poor and sick, then a similar line of reasoning can be used to do far more disagreeable things. Beware!

My stance is that charity is a church, a religious, affair. It is up to the individual to contribute, out of the goodness of their heart, to help their neighbors, whether that be to a church or to some organization. The government exists merely to use force to protect our rights to live, to serve one another, not to make life fair or to undo the injustices caused by Satan’s influence on the world. When we replace our churches with government institutions, and give our government leaders the job that we used to give our church leaders, we are setting ourselves up for the same pitfall that plagued Europe during the Dark Ages.

How to Fundamentally Transform Government

Some people think that the Supreme Court will one day step in and make a ruling that will bring the constitution back to its text, and preserve the rights and freedoms of the people in the process. This will never happen.

Some people think that a new constitutional amendment will be passed, either by the states or the congress, and that magically, the constitution will protect the rights and freedoms of the people. This will never happen, either.

Some people think that one day, we’ll elect a congress and a president, and legislatures across the country, which will begin the slow and arduous process of moving the country towards liberty by  whittling away at socialist programs, by creating a free enterprise sector of the economy where everyone is free to get rich, and by weaning people off of government. This could happen, but not how you would think.

There is not going to be a magical election when, all of a sudden, Americans choose a different government substantially different from the last. That will never happen.

Americans will oscillate between two kinds of governments, governments that represent pluralities in our country. The Founding Fathers intended this. They wanted the House of Representatives to oscillate between extremes. By choosing representatives by majority or plurality votes, all it takes is a tiny shift in public opinion, and a new party sweeps congress. They could’ve done some proportional allocation scheme, where power doesn’t transfer as rapidly, but they did not.

The change that needs to occur, the only change that will change our government, is in the hearts and minds of the people. One by one, as people’s ideas change, their votes change, and the governments change. It is up to us to convince the majority of our fellow countrymen that our ideas are correct and our ideological opponents are wrong. It is no different than the effort required to convince people to change their religion, or to change their lifestyle, or to adopt new technologies. It can be done, but it is not easy.

Our fight is not in the Supreme Court, or in the presidency, or in Congress, or in the ballot box, even. These are all effects, not causes. Our fight is ultimately in the minds of every one of the people in this country. Our job is to educate and motivate.

Ultimately, a piece of paper, the constitution, cannot secure your freedom. To expect such a thing is laughable. I can’t imagine that the Mongol Hordes were stopped by people waving contracts and laws in their face. It was stopped by people, thousands and thousands of individuals who stood up, faced their fears, stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and  fought rather than ran.

And so it is in our country. The Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, care nothing about you. They don’t even know who you are. They don’t want to know. To expect them to care about you because of a piece of paper is laughable. What makes them care is the fact that so many other people in our country care about you. What gives the constitution power is that so many other people care about it as well.

If the majority who vote at the polls care about individual liberty and the constitution, then the government will care, deeply, about what they think. The government will do everything in their power to ensure that they get re-elected in the next election. As long as the voters care, the government will care.

If you want to fundamentally transform America, don’t throw your hopes in a candidate or a supreme court case. What a false God that is! Instead, work to convince your neighbors and your friends to change how they vote. Change will not happen overnight, but it will happen. One day, we’ll have a majority in congress who actually cut the budget, who lower taxes, who pass constitutional amendments to further limit the power of government, who install justices who only care about the text of the constitution.

We’ll simply have the government we deserve.

See, God created man in his own image. He gave us dominion over ourselves and the earth we live on. He stepped away, with his ultimate rule being, “It’s up to you now.” We are the ones in charge, not a handful of people. We are the ones who determine our fate and who choose how to live our lives each day.  We can choose to look to false gods, pieces of paper, arbitrary groups, or the ballot box, or we can choose to look to the true God, and trust that the power to rule ultimately rests with the thing he said it rests in: the hands and minds and voices of every living person on this planet.

Empower yourself. Look at the world as the master and commander of your own fate. So what if our government is unjust and inequal? Do you think mankind did perfectly fine under tyranny in the past? Didn’t people live and breath and work and worship while their rulers violated their rights? Stand up, count yourself as free despite the things around you, empower those around you. Teach them the true doctrine of the true God, that we are free and man is lord over all the earth by divine birthright through Adam, that we are not animals or slaves or anything less than mirrors of the God of the universe. Teach them about natural law, God’s laws, laws that apply equally and eternally to all, and the justice of the laws, and the injustice of man’s laws. Teach them to crave a government where men’s rights are the aim and goal of every action, not because of the benevolence of its actors but because the power ultimately rests in the hands of the people. See what effect this will have.

That is our fight. Yes, campaign, and vote, and get your friends to vote, but don’t put your hopes in the arm of flesh.

Roberts the Justice

As you no doubt heard, Obamacare has been ruled constitution by Chief Justice Roberts, which offset Justice Kennedy’s unconstitutional vote and made it law.

His reasoning is not simple or terse. Lawyers at Power Line Blog are analyzing it as we speak. Some of the initial analysis is already enlightening.

Chief Justice Roberts did exactly what I would like all justices to do. The Supreme Court is not where we settle our society’s problems. It is to be used, exclusively, to sort cases out and apply the law fairly to all.

I am one of those who still believe that Marbury vs. Madison was wrongly decided. Meaning, the power to decide what is or is not constitutional is in each of the components of the federal government, the people, and the states. They are to use their powers to enforce their view over all the others, which powers have been carefully allocated to ensure one cannot exceed the bounds to the detriment of the other.

This case is Chief Justice Roberts doing exactly that. He said, “There is an argument that makes the law constitutional, and people who would disobey the law won’t be able to hide behind the constitution because of it.” Then he described how one could navigate constitutional law. The navigable route is simply that Obama passed a massive tax increase with a loophole for those who buy health insurance that makes the IRS happy. This will surely be a scarlet letter during the upcoming election, but that is not why I like this decision. I like it because it makes sense. Yes, it is a tax, I admitted it, many others did, despite the fact Obama and all the other constitutional lawyers on the left denied it.

I believe that the president, the congress, the states, and the people should use the constitutional argument to shut each other down. If congress believes something is unconstitutional, they should not expect some other part of government to overturn it. They should realize they are the first and last bulwark of what is constitutional or not, and what becomes law in our country or not.

As such, it is up to us, the people, to choose representatives, senators, governors, and presidents who agree with us about our interpretation of the constitution, and are willing to fight (with their constitutional power) to defend it.

If the Supreme Court had acted with such prudence before the Civil War when they heard the case of Dredd Scott, I don’t think we would’ve had a Civil War. Recall that it was the Supreme Court that imposed slavery on the Northern states. Before the Dred Scott decision, a Southerner dare not take their slaves into free states, because the free states did not recognize slavery according to law. Although this was annoying to Southerners, and although it meant that slaves were slipping out of the Southern states into the North, it was hardly a reason to go to war. Many countries exist side-by-side with rules that harm the other without war. Besides, the importation of slaves was already banned, meaning that what slaves were bought or sold were either already slaves or born into it in the South.

There was an amicable resolution to the slavery question, one which a particular candidate for president advocated before he was murdered. It was simply this: ban slavery everywhere, by buying the slaves from the South with federal monies and freeing them. With no slaves imported and no existing slaves, the institution would end without a single tear shed.

The question of abortion is another instance where the Supreme Court went to far. The reasoning behind it was a new invented right that the constitutional subtext supposes to exist. Since people are private in their papers, then that means we can’t search inside women’s wombs to see if they are with child or not, and so we can’t have laws anywhere in the country that forbid the slaughter of unborn children, regardless of when a child is consider to be a living person under the law. How the one is connected to the other has never been explained, since it cannot be explained. As a child, I did not understand it. As an adult, it is the kind of logic that wants to make me scream.

If you are one of those sort who despise Roberts for ruling against freedom and liberty and for government largess, I beg you to reconsider. His job is not to create government in the way he sees fit. Any justice that believes that is their job should be impeached immediately. His job is simply to read the law and the constitution and do his best to reconcile them in specific cases. What more could we want in a justice? To give them anything more is to create an absolute oligarchy, a rule by justices.On the other hand, if you have become a newfound fan of Roberts because he has sided with your cause, I beg you to reconsider. Today’s friend will be tomorrow’s foe, because it is not allegiance to one side or the other that caused him to write his opinion in that way.

I would like to crawl inside the mind of Scalia and Thomas. Unfortunately, Justice Kennedy wrote that decision. I am left to imagine what they were thinking. Their argument hinges on the fact that it was not a tax. I would like to know why they say it is not, because to me, it was and is a tax.

Gratefully, the “other” four justices wrote their decision separately from Roberts, arguing that the commerce clause empowers the federal government to do whatever it wishes, damn the people. To them, the government could mandate we all worship golden calves, or make slaves one of another, because the commerce clause empowers the government to do so. They have never implied there is a limit, and their decision today reflects this. I am grateful because they are honestly telling the American people what they stand for. Now, the American people can tell their senators they want more like Roberts, and less like Sotomayor or Ginsburg.

So at least there is good news today. 5 to 4, the Supreme Court ruled that there are limits on government despite the commerce clause. One of those limits is mandating the purchase of something. This is something that hasn’t happened, ever, as far as I can see. We are now entering in new territory, territory where the Supreme Court will not go along with anything congress says simply because they utter the magic phrase “commerce clause”. This is truly a turning point.