Quietly rewriting the Declaration

Why do progressives work so diligently to weed Christianity out of the body politic? They wish to rewrite the Declaration of Independence as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal (and must remain so), that they are endowed by the State with certain conditional Rights, that among these are Life, (provided it is of sufficient “quality”), Liberty, (if proper behavior and attitudes are maintained), and the pursuit of the Collective Good.”

Let us consider these items one at a time.

1. Undermining our society’s Christian foundations

Eliminate home schooling and force everyone to place their children in the hands of NEA propagandists to be indoctrinated with progressive biases.

Next, define religious schools as child abuse as pretext to shut them down and give the progressives a total monopoly over the minds of our children.

Pull down visible religious symbols, and prohibit any religious activity in school.

2. Instituting the culture of death

“Progressive” social democracy constitutes the culture of death: abortion, euthanasia, “mercy” killing. The camel’s nose under the tent flap begins with the notion of “terminally ill” patients. But soon it expands to the “terminally inconvenient." Elitists then decide if your “quality of life is sufficient” to allow you to live.

If the progressive purpose provides “security to all citizens”, the State then claims the right to enforce things in your life that benefit the State. “You must wear a motorcycle helmet! If you bang your head, and become a vegetable, it will cost too much to care for you!” True enough. But what about the next step? “Living too long is ‘unfair’ because you consume more than your “fair share” of welfare resources!”

“Upon receipt of this letter, you are hereby notified that upon reaching your 72nd birthday, your retirement and Social Security benefits are terminated. You will vacate your government apartment, surrender your accounts and possessions to proper authorities, and report to the euthanasia center by no later than 10:00 PM on January 16th.”

Another outrage: the progressive obsession with casualties in Iraq, used to undermine the war effort. 4000 brave men and women lost in the fight against a world-wide barbarous Islamic tyranny over the last 5 years. Regrettable, but what about the 3700 lives snuffed PER DAY by abortion? Or what about the 42,000 a year killed in automobile accidents?

3. Hypocrisy in action

Abortion, by far, is the biggest killer of Americans, with the total of over 1.2 million deaths per year! In 1973 we discovered we were expecting our son Glenn. The nurse casually asked my wife “do you want to keep it”? I remember the cold chill and horror I felt at the time. (My cherished son an “it”!) Yet tens of millions of Americans my son’s age have been murdered by their parents before they had a chance for life. If the progressives really cared about life, they would be on the other side of this issue.

Theologically we’re in trouble: King Manasseh of ancient Judah (697 to 642 BC) “..did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” (2Chr 33:2). His greatest sin was “he burned his sons as an offering in the valley of the son of Hinnom” (2 Chr 33:6). King Manasseh revived the ancient Canaanite practice of sacrificing children to Moloch. How many children were burnt alive in the 55 years that King Manasseh reigned? Tens of thousands? Even the piety of his grandson, King Josiah, was not enough to redeem the Jewish society from the punishing destruction of 586 BC.

Yet WE have “sacrificed” tens of MILLIONS to our false gods of selfishness and convenience! If people are an asset, how much richer and stronger our society would be today if the 50 million young people my son’s age were alive today! If people are an asset, why are we thus destroying the very future of the society?

Progressives strive to make children unfashionable. The very class of people most able to raise fine children are the very ones killing them! “Progressive” society prefers to subsidize generation after generation of welfare dependent single mothers who spawn illegitimate children for income!

We believe our God is a loving God. But He is also a just God. Can we really think we will NOT be held accountable for this unquestioned sin of abortion?

I saw a bumper sticker stating “A voice for choice: every child a wanted child!” I gagged! Why not this? “A voice for choice: Every Citizen a wanted Citizen /s/Adolph Hitler!” The roots of Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood go deep into Nazi Eugenics that any genuine liberal would abhor!

4. Finally, “liberty and the pursuit of happiness”

See how progressives handle these in areas they already control: on campus! speech codes, political correctness, intolerance of diverse points of view. The party line in spades! Imagine society completely controlled by progressives: Look what’s happening in Canada as we speak.

If our society wishes to preserve the liberties it now takes for granted, it must remember and heed the words of one of the founding Fathers, Patrick Henry: “Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

Memo to my libertarian friends

“Conservative gathering, liberal dose of pessimism,” was the headline over a Mar. 28 story on the previous night's panel hosted by Face the State, America's Future Foundation, and the Independence Institute. The Rocky's reporter, who was sitting to my right, not laughing while feverously jotting notes, did a passable job describing the occasion. The article, however, didn’t quite capture the feel of the event. The venue was elegant, the food and wine quite tasty. The speakers, of which four (including the moderator) were libertarian and one lone conservative, bantered about the libertarian-social conservative rift and its toll on the party.

One of the libertarians, Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara, identified Republican disintegration along with liberal Democrats' solidarity, cash, and smarts, as the reasons the West was lost. Even more insightful was his observation that big-government Republicans -- be they of the blueblooded country club variety, the big spending, entitlement expanding “compassionate” variety, or the give me taxpayer money for my business/chamber of commerce/organization/pet project variety -- are the real enemy of conservatism, not social conservatives. I hope other libertarians were listening.

I think what surprised me about the event is just how much antipathy libertarians have for social conservatives. That might be too strong of a characterization but there seemed to be an unkind edge in some of the humor. As a person who is both a fiscal and social conservative I felt a little battered. Nevertheless, I want to help heal the breach. And so here’s a little food for thought for my libertarian friends.

Stereotypes: not helpful. Evoking Jerry Falwell as a typical social conservative is not useful. A) He’s deceased. B) Though a player two decades ago, he’s been largely irrelevant since. A disheveled, government-phobic, dental-challenged libertarian from a fortified bunker in Montana probably has little in common with you, so I won’t conjure that image in every single speech and debate.

Secondly, on our differences (gay marriage and drug legalization just to pick two), I actually have some logical reasons for my beliefs. We could discuss them and possibly find common ground or at least an appreciation for each other's reasons.

Calling me a bigot who wants to deprive people of civil rights isn’t exactly a thoughtful response to my concerns about the impact of gay marriage. My primary objection to same-sex marriage is a libertarian one – it suppresses dissenting views. The state of Massachusetts shut down a Catholic adoption agency because it did not adopt to same-sex couples (the agency does not even receive government money). The same thing has happened in England. In Colorado, gay couples are free to call themselves "married," live together, have children, etc. Their status is recognized by those who agree with their lifestyle. State intervention in favor of these unions would force anyone who does not agree to shut down their business or organization. That doesn’t sound like freedom to me.

On drug legalization, I sympathize with cancer victims and believe strongly that if marijuana helps them they should have as much of it as they need. Let’s not be naïve. The average pot smoker is not a terminally ill cancer patient or a responsible yuppie couple who smoke occasionally in the privacy of their own home after the kids are tucked in. It’s the guy who is unemployed or underemployed who uses me, the taxpayer, as his health insurance provider. Even though he might be able to handle working behind the 7-Eleven counter, his counterpart on meth is probably a little too wired and wild-eyed for customer service. This guy would rather break into my house and steal my stuff to pay for his habit.

How much of my taxpayer money goes to health care, food, housing, treatment programs, and other services for potheads, meth addicts, junkies and crackheads? We sure need more of these guys, and legalization would guarantee it. I’m happy to have a civil debate about the impact of legalization of drugs or vice generally on civilization if you promise not to drag cancer patients and hemp farmers (hemp is used to make rope, by the way) into it.

Yes, I’m being cheeky but the point is that people in this coalition are going to have differences based on real concerns. Conceit, stereotyping, and bitterness are not productive. We need each other. If we only want to work with people with whom we agree 100% of the time, it’s going to be a small crowd, powerless against the proponents of big government control.

The Cato Institute speaker that night predicted a mass of libertarians going over to Obama. Great idea if you want to work with people who are diametrically opposed to everything you’ve worked for all your life. National health care, high taxes, adding a gazillion more government programs to an already behemoth federal government – yep, that’s compatible with libertarian thought.

If you want to jump ship out of spite, you might end up in the water with the sharks. Or, we can work together. Your call.

Editor: See also Jessica Corry's followup report from the same evening.

Russ Oberlin, 1929-2008

"Be who you are, use what you have, do what you can." Russ Oberlin stopped me at a recent political meeting to pass along these dozen words that summarized -- he said with an earnest smile -- an ethic of responsibility and giving as well as any quote he could remember from nearly eight decades of life. Russ lived that ethic admirably until the day of his sudden passing on on March 18, and its impact was attested by the throng of friends and fellow Republicans who crowded his memorial service in Littleton on March 22. What an exemplary gentleman, husband, father, and citizen he was!

Our thoughts are prayers are with Jane, Russ's wife of 56 years, and their children: Cynthia, Patty, David, and Blake. The family asks that memorial gifts be made to Developmental Pathways, the organization serving developmentally disabled persons, for which volunteered tirelessly over the past two decades.

The Telling of the Truth: William F. Buckley’s Life in Letters

“It is always fascinating to watch people react to the telling of the truth,” wrote Bill Buckley in his first book, God and Man at Yale. It is equally interesting to watch people react to the passing of someone who told the truth. Not your truth or my truth. Not the truth as he saw it. Not the truth as best he knew it. Not the kind of truth that feels good today but is opposite to the wisdom of the ages and of the sages, both past and future, and thus destroys tomorrow. The simple truth; or, as Christian apologist and philosopher of history and culture Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying, true truth: about life and about eternity, as it is available to any honest mind. The truth of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, their grandparents, and their grandchildren – linguistically adorned, philosophically beatified, and internationally contextualized to tell a true story that properly placed the man on the street, his full human and spiritual dignity intact, into the drama of the life of the nation and the life of nations.

Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston phone book than by the entire Harvard faculty not because he wanted to be cute, but because he wanted to tell the truth.

It was the same kind of truth Buckley told about Yale in 1951 at the tender age of 25. By then he in his exceptional talents had already discerned that even, or perhaps especially, many in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League had developed a curious aversion to true truth. It is an aversion that has almost universally swallowed up American intellectuals, and which Buckley was providentially destined, singularly equipped, and, it seemed, inordinately pleased to battle his entire life.

Even by the standards of the most literate literati, his vocabulary was staggering. And he wielded it not in the pretentious, ostentatious manner in which the mainstream, “drive-by” media are prone to wield theirs in an attempt to justify, mainly to themselves, their right to occupy the august, influential post to which they have risen. Rather, he wielded his with the commanding ease of a man who knew God was bigger than he was, and who was thus less interested in the great words he knew than in the great ideas – indeed, the great ideological worlds – he knew lay behind the words, and less interested in glorifying himself than in, as he put it, standing athwart history crying, in all wise benevolence, “Stop!”

His humor was of a type that has become a bit of a hallmark in conservative circles: the kind that is less a positive creation for entertainment than an unavoidable adaptation to the telling of the truth and the negative or embarrassed reaction the truth engenders. When you repeatedly tell the truth, and that truth is not only repeatedly rejected, but repeatedly caricatured, studiously avoided, and, when the inevitable calamity arrives as a result, repeatedly blamed for having created the calamity, one develops a certain modestly self-aggrandizing humor that every genuine conservative recognizes and that no such conservative begrudges another. So Buckley, when asked why he tended to sit during his TV episodes of “Firing Line” and most other TV interviews: “It’s difficult to stand up under the weight of all I know.”

It’s not arrogance; it’s an attempt to advertise a healthy confidence in the truth in an age peopled by, as G. K. Chesterton once quipped, a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication tables.

His literary output was enormous, for a time almost single-handedly sustaining a post-war renaissance in conservative – that is, true – thought about God, man, Yale, society, state, and history. Like few others – his friend, the late Dr. Russell Kirk, did something notably similar – he put words, ideas, and history behind and around the thoughts, knowledge, emotions, convictions, hopes, and political visions of millions of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who sensed in the latter half of 20th century the rise of an aggressive totalitarian ideology that was finding a weaker and weaker United States, and a weaker and weaker spiritual, moral, and political backbone in the West, as its only meaningful world opposition.

The talk in the last week about Buckley as a defender of a more urbane, sophisticated, polished, and agreeable brand of conservatism than that to which we – sigh – are now condemned in the wake of his death is mere media kerfuffle. It is the kind of talk that comes from people not substantive enough to know what to say when an authentically great man passes. When Ronald Reagan passed, we heard much the same sort of thing from people who had spent their entire public careers criticizing, caricaturing, slandering, and opposing him. Now that he’s gone, what fond memories we have of him! What a better sort of conservatism he stood for! What dignity, what learnedness, what charity, what disagree-without-calling-your-opponents-names know-how he had! If only we had more like him!

The move is mendacious: a back-handed way of insulting those conservatives – that is, truth tellers – who remain, with whom both Reagan and Buckley consorted and identified their entire lives, and with whom still resides the only authentic stewardship of the life and legacy of either man.

Then, of course, there are the polite but empty compliments from respectable, moderate folk: even if you didn’t agree with Buckley on everything, by God, at least you knew where he stood! Or, even if you didn’t agree with Buckley on everything, you had to admire his talents and passion on behalf of what he believed in! The point being not to praise Buckley for anything genuinely praiseworthy, but to, again in a back-handed way, partake oneself of the immediate trend among the fashionable – the thing one is really in a habit of caring about – of honoring the venerable dead without oneself having to do anything like what the venerable dead did to earn the honor. That is, pay one’s easy respects to the dead without having to agree that this particular dead took the risk of telling the truth; of doing it for a long time; of sacrificing the many lucrative and fashionable engagements that one is oneself angling for and which would have easily been his had he chosen that easier pathway through life; and of putting up with the marginalization and condemnation from enemies, and not infrequent abandonment by ostensible friends, that inevitably attend such a courageous career.

In short, one is offering polite courtesies without offering the one thing that would truly honor the venerable dead: a frank admission that he was right, and you were wrong to disagree with, publicly oppose, or maintain a convenient silence toward him and what he believed, and toward what his genuine friends and heirs still believe.

The modern conservative movement in America – and the movement conservatives who comprise it – recognize innately that Buckley’s influence will last as long as our movement does. Many of us not only grew up with faithful, interested parents who kept copies of National Review on their coffee tables and in toilet-side baskets, but we still now have dusty, closeted boxes full of back issues with cartoon caricatures of Al Gore on the cover and Buckley’s inimitable columns in the back.

Yes, if only we had more of him. Eagles flock not, but one day, if God is gracious, there will be another collegiate Elijah who arises with the kind of spirit to, before he is 30, take on an Ivy League establishment, a political establishment, a world of easy, empty, errant words, with the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker’s truth that man is made in the image of God, and that what has happened once in six thousand years – a Gentile nation consciously and publicly founded on that truth – is not likely to ever happen again.

Bill Buckley personally remembered

"He was our prophet. Without him there would have been no conservative movement, no nomination of Goldwater in 1964, no election of Reagan in 1980, no winning of a Republican Congress in 1994." So wrote James Humes to the sister of the late William F. Buckley Jr. in a personal note of condolence that he shared with listeners on Backbone Radio, March 2. Humes is the author of books on Reagan, Churchill, Lincoln, and Shakespeare, as well as a speechwriter for five presidents.

The Buckley tribute also included personal reminiscences of him by Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute and by hosts John Andrews and Matt Dunn. Here is the full text of James Humes's handwritten letter:

Dear Trish,

Bill was the leading star in the glittering galaxy of your family. But in the rest of the Conservative world he was our prophet.

Without him there would have been no Conservative "movement," no nomination of Goldwater in 1964, no election of Reagan in 1980, no winning of a Republican Congress in 1994.

He was the Founding Father - the combination of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in our political philosophy - not to mention Edmund Burke.

His resplendent vocabulary manifested the brilliance of his mind and his rendering on the harpsichord radiated a baroque elegance to an all too arid and godless society.

Like the trans-oceanic yachtsman he was, he charted like a Columbus, new horizons for Conservatives to sail. In the world of intellect and politics he did, in Shakespeare's words, "bestride our narrow world like a colossus."

James Humes March 1, 2008