Archive [July 1999]

Last month, the New Jersey state assembly voted to require public school students to recite daily a passage from a certain document.

Feminists were aghast. Laurie Lowenstein, the head of New Jersey Right to Choose, worried that the controversial words would turn schoolchildren into rabid pro-lifers. Elizabeth Volz, president of the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for Women, found the idea “dangerous.” Ed Gallagher, spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest public teacher’s union, called the document in question “a little jingoistic.”

What are these alarming words? What document could possibly make feminazis fear the spread of opposition to abortion? The manifesto of some right-wing conspiracists, perhaps? The Ten Commandments?

No, the words that caused this firestorm are none other than these:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed!”

The most famous lines from the Declaration of Independence.

Nia Gill, a member of the New Jersey house, led the opposition: “At the time these words were written,” she said, “only white men, and only white men with property, were perceived to be the beneficiaries of these words.” She complained: “To have it repeated every day that all men are created equal … does not meet the present-day expectations of these young women in these schools.”

Present-day expectations do not include any troublesome references to “their Creator,” either. Neil Cohen dismissed the whole idea as a “thinly veiled” attempt to introduce prayer into the public school. Some critics even called the 56 words “a secular prayer.” Whatever the heck that is.

Fifty assemblymen voted in favor of the bill; 16 voted against. But New Jersey Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman let it be known that she had reservations, and a state senate committee has now tabled the measure.

My friends, if this doesn’t expose a tragic lack of understanding of the pillars of American democracy, I don’t know what does. To elected officials, as well as to many of those who claim to educate our children, the founding document of our country, penned by Thomas Jefferson, is nothing but a racist, sexist, theocratic diatribe. The words that sparked a War of Independence, which purchased our freedom with the blood of patriots, contain ideas so poisonous that American youths must be protected from them.

But no one should be surprised at this. Why should we think the union-dominated, politically correct public schools would allow students to be contaminated by the writings of dead white European males like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay? Besides, you can’t expect kids to understand terms like “unalienable” anyway.

Before you know it, the Declaration of Independence will be held to be unconstitutional. The Federalist Papers, too. The level of ignorance is so deep, and so complete, that someday, even the reading of the Constitution itself will be deemed unconstitutional in schools.

The biggest mistake we make as Americans is to consign our nation’s founding documents to history. They do not belong to history. They transcend time. Every word was written for the 21st century — and the 22nd — and onward.

Too many of us think of the Constitution as some crumbling yellowed parchment under special glass in Washington, D.C. We assume that words written with a quill pen are quaint, stale, frozen in time. When someone talks about “founding documents” our eyes glaze over, and we think of long-dead men who wore powdered wigs. You know, those scenes in old paintings.

But the Constitution cannot be contained in a museum display. (It’s all over the Internet: try, for instance, www.constitution-facts.com or www.usconstitution.net/const.text.) Its words — and especially those of the Bill of Rights — crackle with life. They are vigorous, muscular, direct and devastatingly clear. There is a certain amount of defiance there, an American attitude. You cannot read the words without a lift of the heart — especially these: “Congress shall make no law…”

These ideas are built for the next century, and the next, and the next. With one caveat: the Constitution, like the Declaration of Independence, is only as strong as the knowledge and education of the people of this country.

If the people are not willing to read the Constitution, not willing to learn it, to study it, if they instead choose to throw their freedoms and liberties away, then the Constitution is worthless.

If the people are willing to allow the Constitution to be defined for them by a liberal elite, so that it operates as a document promoting the evolutionary growth of the government, having government try to handle everyday problems in life (making sure your neighbor doesn’t drive too big a car, for example), then that is what the Constitution will become.

The people are going to get what they want, and if that’s a Constitution that erodes rather than protects freedom, that’s exactly what it will become.

If you think that the Constitution of the United States exists for the purpose of some Americans being able to say to other Americans, “Oh, you smoke. Well, you better get the heck outside,” then you have a jaundiced view. If your view of the Constitution is anything other than a protection of your freedom and liberty against the government — if you think it’s anything other than that — then you have not been properly taught about the Constitution, and I strongly suggest you start learning it, posthaste.

All you have to do to learn it is read it. It’s easily understood. Just read it! You don’t need to go to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and listen to their special course on the exclusionary rule. You don’t need to spend 15,000 hours reading the scholarship on the free speech clause of the First Amendment. Just read the free speech clause of the First Amendment. It isn’t that hard.

But watch out. Because if you happen to believe in the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution, it can get you kept off the Supreme Court. Ask Robert Bork. Remember how Judge Bork was eviscerated by the Democrat-controlled Senate in 1987? He expounded the view that the Constitution of the United States does not enumerate a right to privacy. And he was right. The Constitution has no broad, generalized, undefined right of privacy.

Judge Bork’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, at the time headed by Joe Biden, was a paradigm of reason and sobriety: “No civilized person wants to live in a society without privacy. And, in fact, the Framers of the Constitution protected privacy in a variety of ways. The First Amendment protects free exercise of religion. The free speech provision of the First Amendment has been held to protect the privacy of membership lists and a person’s associations, in order to make the free speech right effective. The Fourth Amendment protects the individual’s home and office from unreasonable searches and seizures, and usually requires a warrant. The Fifth Amendment has a right against self-incrimination. There is much more. There is a lot of privacy in the Constitution.”

Yet they burned him at the stake. They gave the English language a new word: To “bork,” a verb: “attack viciously a candidate or appointee, especially by misrepresentation in the media,” according to Safire’s Political Dictionary. Teddy Kennedy, the Senator from Chappaquiddick, claimed that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions,” “blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” and “rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids.”

Another committee Democrat, Howard Metzenbaum, now thankfully retired into obscurity, contended that Bork “believes the government has the right to regulate the family life and the sex life of every American.” The confirmation hearings became such a circus, with every crevasse of the nominee’s life under scrutiny, it got to the point where Alabama Democrat Howell Heflin actually made Judge Bork tell the committee why he decided to grow a beard.

All this simply because Judge Bork refused to do what liberal judges have been doing for decades: using the Constitution as a judicial tool to thwart the will of the American people and advance the liberal agenda in ways voters would not permit their elected representatives to do. They did it to him because so very much undemocratic power was at stake, about to slip through the fingers of big government.

The liberals have also succeeded in convincing too many people into thinking the Constitution is a blueprint for how the government is to grow, to spend money, and to handle all the things that go wrong in America. That’s not what it is. Nor was it ever intended to be so. The Constitution of the United States of America is the most profound, the most beautiful, the most intelligent document establishing a nation ever written. Indeed, it is the envy of the world.

The great British Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1878 called our Constitution “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” British historian Paul Johnson, in his recent History of the American People, writes, “The making of the United States Constitution ought to be a mode! to all states seeking to set up a federal system, or changing their form of government, or beginning nationhood from nothing.”

It was written specifically to enumerate the liberties of the people who lived in this country. It was written so as to describe how those liberties could not be infringed upon by the government. The Founders of this country, because of their study of history and because of what they had fled in England, knew the tendencies of people in power. They knew the ease with which those in power could evolve to tyranny and dictatorship. They understood that once those in power figured out that they were able to vote themselves money from the federal treasury, the very Republic they had established was threatened.

In 1811, Justice Joseph Story became, at 32, the youngest man ever appointed to the Supreme Court. As he wrote in his 1840 book A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution, “Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, of property, of religion, and of independence.”

Story concluded this work with a warning, however. He wrote that the Constitution “has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour, by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE. Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.”

Sound like anyone you know?

Story also said the words of the Constitution “are to be taken in their natural and obvious sense, and not in a sense unreasonably restricted or enlarged.”

Do you know when the federal courts really started thwarting the will of the people in the name of the Constitution? The answer may surprise you. It began with the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857, which liberals love to paint as a conservative ruling. Scott was a black slave in Missouri, then a slave state. He had brought suit claiming that because his master had taken him into free territory, he had thus been rendered free.

But Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney wrote the 5-to-4 opinion declaring that blacks “were not intended to be included under the word ‘citizen’ in the Constitution, and he [Scott] could not bring suit in federal court…” Taney was not satisfied to merely keep this man in shackles; he made Dred Scott v Sandford only the second Supreme Court decision to use the power of judicial review to nullify an act of Congress as unconstitutional.

Constitutional theorist William Eaton describes this first rearing of the ugly head of judicial imperialism in his book Who Killed the Constitution?: “Taney declared, retrospectively, that the Missouri Compromise, in seeking to limit the spread of slavery, was unconstitutional to make doubly sure that Dred Scott, and others in his position, could never claim any of its benefits … Taney in effect amended the Constitution in violation of the amending process set forth therein. And in retroactively repealing, by judicial fiat, the congressionally enacted Missouri Compromise, he invaded the legislative powers vested by the Constitution in Congress.”

Thus the American people’s legislative efforts to begin solving its most profound problem — slavery — by preventing its spread were thwarted by a politically motivated Chief Justice. “What Taney did,” according to Eaton, “was to change the meaning of the Constitution, and then to use that changed meaning to destroy congressional legislation with which he disagreed.”

Sound familiar? The late Harry Blackmun did exactly the same thing in Roe v. Wade in 1973. He took the fictional “right to privacy” invented by Justice William O. Douglas in Griswold v Connecticut in 1964 and found a “right to have an abortion” within it, based on the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments — both of which make no mention of either abortion or privacy. Thus the abortion laws of all 50 states were swept aside in one fell swoop.

As Justice Byron White, a John F. Kennedy appointee to the high court, wrote in his dissent from Roe, it was “an exercise of raw judicial power” in which Blackmun “simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.”

While liberals enshrine non-existent constitutional rights, at the same time they trample on the real ones. Liberals especially disparage the Second Amendment to the Constitution: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

The right to keep and bear arms is No. 2 for a reason. It’s not number ten; it’s not number eight. The Framers considered it of paramount importance.

It was not to make sure that people could go out and hunt Bambi. The Second Amendment is not there to make sure that people are prepared when the Redcoats come marching over the next hill.

You may not want to hear it, and you certainly may not want to believe it, because you fear in believing it that you will be identifying yourself with a kook fringe out there. But you have to understand that the reason for the Second Amendment is to make sure that the people of this country never find themselves in a situation where they were unarmed against a government prone to tyranny.

If you understand nothing else, understand that the Constitution of the United States is a document limiting the ability of government to infringe upon the freedom of the people of this country.

The Constitution was written for you, was written for me. It was not written for the President of the United States. It was not written for the Speaker of the House, or the Senate Majority leader. It was not written for the Chief Justice of the United States. It was not written for the Secretary of State. The Constitution does not exist to guarantee the power of any of those office-holders. The Constitution was written to limit their power, and to protect the freedoms and liberties of the people. Thus the responsibility for your freedom, life, pursuit of happiness, is all yours. You must know that the Constitution does not put limits on your behavior; it affirms your freedoms, and puts limits on the government’s behavior. A truly radical idea for the ages. It is the only document of its kind in human history.

The Constitution trumps all else. It trumps, in fact, the Supreme Court. In its brilliance, the Constitution limits what the government can do to abridge your freedom. And you should thank God every day for it.

But education on the Constitution is woefully inept — what it is, why it is, what its true beauty and wisdom is. So few Americans today know where freedoms come from. In fact, do an experiment sometime. Go up to your friends and ask them: where does freedom come from? The correct answer is: God.

Freedom comes from God. But I’ll bet you won’t get that answer. I’ll bet you’ll hear credit given to the government. Liberals have been very successful in persuading Americans that government is the procurer and provider of happiness, and thus must abridge freedom.

That’s why liberals are so fearful to have God mentioned in school. They want the government to be perceived as God, the government is the source of freedom, and they are its agents. Everything flows from government to the people, distributed by the elites.

I reject that out of hand. Which is why I live for the day that it can be honestly stated that liberalism as a dominant ideology is over. That’s my definition of compassion: no more liberalism.

And be of good cheer, that day will come, my friends — the more people understand the United States Constitution … the secret weapon against liberalism.