Constitutional
Freedoms - OurLine in the Sand
A Guest Document
by Tal Brooke (*)
Courtesy of
Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP)
The national landscape has been changing in alarming ways since 9/11. A
once robust nation, a considerably diminished America has embarked on a
perilous course--militarily, politically and financially--while
abrogating critical freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, the
nation's founding mandate. A growing number of legal voices believe
that, in usurping these freedoms, the government has forfeited its own
legal authority by doing the very things that the Constitution, the
highest law of the land, forbids.
The government must obey the law. Do you obey a government that has
broken its highest law?
The citizens, meanwhile, lack the power to challenge the growing
Leviathan of State, able to strip away any privacy and enforce any law
with near omnipotent technology. More daunting, the State has used
various "crises" to get around posse commitatus in order use the
military within "the homeland." It can now turn the military on its own
citizens, whose lives could soon resemble the old proletariate under
Soviet rule, a situation once unthinkable.
As most 5th-graders should know the Constitutional limitations on
governmental power, by implication, are a warning against the rapacious
state becoming a tyranny. These limitations also anticipate the erosion
of freedoms and liberties through clever arguments and sudden crises
used by the State to weaken the resistance of the people.
Constitutional limitations were created so that the government would
remain the servant of the people, and prevent the people from ever
becoming servants of the State. Citizens are to be vigilant against
surrendering their freedoms in exchange for government offers of
protection, welfare or any other so-called benefit. Benjamin Franklin
warned that if they did, they'd be worthy of neither.
SCP's burden is that we, and organizations like us, must have the
freedom to write as we see things, a freedom Americans have taken for
granted for two hundred years. When SCP is no longer able to write
freely--but is required to dance around ever narrowing guidelines
enforced by the State--we will be effectually shut down. This is a key
reason we are concerned about the issue of free speech and related
freedoms, such as individual right to privacy in light of state
surveillance. Anti-hate laws present a terrible trap. Seeming to be
high minded and benign, they will shut the door for any views at odds
with the State. This is a terrible threat.
If today's lawmakers, compromised, corrupted or indifferent to
Constitutional protections, pass draconian anti-hate laws, SCP would be
unable to make any meaningful moral judgments or critique new
religions, Neopaganism, Eastern thought, channeling, Spiritualism,
human potential, emerging cults or their various founders, leaders and
gurus.
At issue is public distrust of the deceit, corruption and blundering of
the government into preemptive wars and mounting debt.
America needs a noble statesman of deep and genuine (not pretended)
Christian conviction, broad vision, intelligence, integrity and
uncompromising character, who would champion the nation's historic
faith, its liberties and freedoms, indeed, its people--an individual
free of the influences of tainted advisors with secret agendas, special
interest groups and powerful political lobbies. A man who is not a
slick, charismatic orator but someone plain spoken and honest, a
champion of the people. Such a one may be our window of hope. But if
our government is again ruled by another whose ultimate loyalty is to a
foreign power or shrouded special interests, America may never recover.
Some fear this might be our last election.
America is in trouble with mounting debt, over thirty million illegal
aliens who have flooded across open borders (as the government subjects
American citizens to humiliating searches), the dollar in free-fall,
growing international contempt for America's hubris and preemptive
wars, the sub-prime lending crisis, banks and mortgage firms being
bailed out as homes are foreclosed, the trillion dollar cost of
invading Iraq, and now a "no fly list" in which the government can
dictate to citizens whether or not they are permitted to fly. Perhaps
most discouraging is the utter indifference of a public distracted by
"bread and circuses," a far cry from those early patriots who fought
for our freedoms.
One of America's premier writers of a century back predicted:
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and
carrying a cross."--Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
This is exactly what comes to mind when you recall American flags and
calls to patriotism being invoked to justify meek public trust of our
preemptive wars in the Middle East, the Patriot Act and emergency
legislation creating an imperial presidency that is above the law--all
of it managed like a Hollywood extravaganza as the people stare on
numbly, barely comprehending what is going on.
In this vein, Judge Napolitano writes in his latest book, A Nation of
Sheep (p. xi), that after 9/11 "the neocons who dominate the Republican
Party" commenced three separate wars: one in Afghanistan, another in
Iraq, and "the third against the civil liberties of the American
people." He states:
[T]he [present Administration] has systematically attacked and
diminished virtually every freedom and right guaranteed by the
Constitution: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of
religion, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the right not
to self incriminate, the right to counsel, the right to speedy trials,
the right to fair trials, the right to avoid cruel and unusual
punishment, even the right to be set free after acquittal! .... the
President has broken laws he swore to uphold, and declined to enforce
laws that he has himself signed into existence.
We may well face the very nightmare that the founders of this Republic
tried to prevent from happening--a tyranny worse than anything they had
seen under King George III. Because, unlike then, the technology of
today can bring virtually any individual to his knees: from implantable
GPS monitoring chips, ID cards, cameras and tracking devices on every
street corner, iris scans, the power of Government to perform unlimited
wire taps and email espionage on its citizens, to the present day
reality of super-computers with vast databases of information about
each and every one of us.
If we "win" the "War on Terror," yet lose our freedoms, we will have
lost everything.
NOTES
(*) Tal Brooke is the
President & Chairman of SCP, Inc, a Berkeley-based research
organization and think-tank. A member of the Society of the Cincinnati,
he has authored nine books and his work has been recognized in Marquis
Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in America as well as The
International Who's Who of Authors. He has won three first place EPA
awards in a nationwide contest. A graduate of the University of
Virginia and Princeton, Tal Brooke has spoken at Cambridge (8 times),
Oxford (4 times), Princeton, Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University of
Virginia, and the University of Edinburgh.
Published on April 1st, 2008
© Copyright 2008 by SCP,
Inc.
Reprinted from original
publication with Permission
The M+G+R Foundation
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