The Bible & the Republic

One need not be Christian or Jewish to embrace America's founding principles, but there is no denying that those principles are rooted in the Old and New Testaments. So it's strange to see individuals or institutions that profess allegiance to the Bible but disallow its relevance to the way we govern ourselves. For those who say Scripture is authoritative, it should guide them not only in religion on Sundays, but also in politics, economics, and academics the other six days of the week. That's the premise of the Saint Louis Statement, a position paper issued by some friends of mine. They were concerned about the many Christian schools and churches that buy into relativist, collectivist, and leftist ideas in disregard of biblical teachings to the contrary. We can all think of examples. (Colorado Christian University, where I direct public policy programs, thankfully isn't one of them.)

The statement, entitled "The Bible, the Republic, the Economy, and the Academy," is posted here. Those of us already listed as signers welcome comments and discussion, as well as anyone wishing to add his or her signature.

He painted the true Colorado

[photopress:allen_true_fm_rotunda.jpg,thumb,pp_image] (Denver Post, Mar. 7) “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” mutters a world-weary American to his paramour at the end of a Hemingway novel. The acid dismissal of love typifies suspicion of idealism in any form, a timeless temptation for humankind. Hemingway gave his story a modern setting but borrowed its title, “The Sun Also Rises,” from Ecclesiastes, a world-weary classic of 2200 years ago. Since the novel’s publication in 1926, Americans have gone on to conquer the Depression, defeat Hitler and Tojo, end segregation and polio, win the Cold War, computerize earth and explore space. Still the stance of cynicism toward nobility and goodness is widely fashionable.

To enter the new wing of the Denver Art Museum, for example, you walk past a huge whiskbroom-and-dustpan sculpture and make your way into a jarring, angular Daniel Liebeskind structure that resembles a glass skyscraper felled by an 8.8 earthquake. Don’t assume you know what beauty is, the objects seem to say. Not so fast with your delight in the human spirit and your pride in our civilization.

After running this gauntlet of the unpretty on a recent afternoon, however, I was more than rewarded by the DAM’s enthralling exhibit of the works of Colorado painter and muralist Allen True, 1881-1955. His heroic depiction of man and nature in the older and newer West may not tell the whole story, but it immortalizes a proud part of it that we should gratefully cherish. You need to see our state’s past through True’s eyes.

Trappers, prospectors, pioneers, cowboys and Indians, builders and aviators come to life under his imagination and brush in a way that celebrates their “men to match my mountains” vision and purpose while escaping Hollywood cliché. And equally striking as the art itself is the self-confidence of an era that could give it a public place of honor all across the city and region, not so very long ago.

“More people, more scars upon the land,” the gate-closing grumble of John Denver in “Rocky Mountain High” (named an official state song in 2007), was not the way Allen True’s generation viewed the human settlement and beautification of this vast territory previously written off as the Great American Desert. A good example is the specimen of his art most familiar to Coloradans, the water saga with True’s murals and Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s verse in our State Capitol rotunda. The theme is people flourishing as modernity advances – rather than the depopulation grimly sought by leftist scolds.

Under the painted, silent gaze of True heroes and heroines, lawmakers not only in our capitol but also in those of Wyoming and Missouri (from which Lewis and Clark, Pike and Fremont started west) make decisions for this new century. You’d like to think the vitality, generosity, and optimism of his art – and of Ferril’s poetry, sure that “beyond the sundown is tomorrow’s wisdom” – would guide them more than the cramped and gloomy green ideology now ascendant.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” said Shelley. The way we visualize and verbalize our sense of possibilities has more power to limit or liberate us than any government. Sentimentality is no substitute for reason and reality, of course, as Hemingway’s scorn for “pretty” thought reminds us. But there is a realism in the American success story, captured by the painter True and the poet Ferril, superior to the sentimentalism of frightened Gaia-worship. Let’s embrace it.

The West portrayed in old songs, an open range and Front Range with never a discouraging word, mountain majesties near gleaming cities undimmed by tears, may lack practicality. Yet it’s a better ideal to strive for than anything in Al Gore’s lugubrious poetry – and Allen True depicts it gloriously. The True exhibit runs through March 28, not to be missed.

Political principles, slavery and abortion

When Abraham Lincoln, born 201 years ago today, delivered his immortal Gettysburg Address, he called for a "new birth of freedom." He had issued the Emancipation Proclamation more than a year before, which gave a wartime justification that he knew would ultimately be a peacetime bounty: the end of slavery in America. This "new birth" entailed shedding the remnants of old world conditions in the new by removing the massive contradiction between a free, republican constitution and the bondage of millions of human beings. No one understood more than Lincoln how revolutionary was this massive change in American life, but it took a man of his conservative thought and disposition to foresee its possibility long before and patiently await its consummation in the right circumstances. In his Lyceum speech given a quarter century before the enforcement of the Proclamation, Lincoln warned of a man of towering genius whose fame would eclipse the founders’ by either emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Men of the highest political ambition are not satisfied with serving in a regime of someone else’s making. But this was also an implicit warning that the nation’s unresolved dilemma could not forever be ignored.

Some of Lincoln’s critics, whether among the die-hard confederate sympathizers or liberal debunkers, saw in this early speech signs of a Caesarist temper. But Lincoln proved by his years in Whig politics that he was not an abolitionist and not thirsting for unmerited glory. Indeed, by constantly harking back to the founding fathers and their political principles, particularly in the crisis spawned by the Democratic party’s continual efforts to expand the territory of slavery, he reminded the nation that those principles are a rebuke to domestic slavery that are not to be forever ignored.

As to why the founders did not themselves abolish slavery, it had long been understood that its massive presence in half of the original states had rendered that eminently desirable object impossible. But Lincoln turned attention back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the future states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin; not to mention the Missouri Compromise of 1819, which prohibited slavery in most of the Louisiana Territory–at least until the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened it up to that evil in 1854.

It is also a fact that northern states all prohibited slavery by the time of the Constitution’s completion in 1787. Lincoln’s explanation was as simple as it was profound: the "central idea" of the Declaration of Independence was "the standard maxim for free society." While it did not result in the complete prohibition or elimination of slavery, it was "constantly labored for," however imperfectly, as "circumstances would well admit." Those principles of equality and liberty are eternally right, but require the consent of the governed for their full implementation.

The right circumstances came in the midst of the Civil War, a conflict in which Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, identified slavery as its cause. Not only the survival of the Union but the future of liberty was at stake in that war, which dragged on far longer than anyone had foreseen or desired, and had forced a choice on the commander-in-chief. Defeating the rebels required that they be deprived of a powerful asset, namely, the continued labor of their slaves while the masters and their sons fought the war’s battles. Sustaining support for the war in the North required that the sacrifices of thousands of its men not result in maintaining an institution that shamed the nation in the eyes of the world. Thus did the "ancient faith" of the American people impose their authority decades after its utterance in their founding documents.

As Union soldiers overran rebel strongholds and ultimately forced their surrender, slavery was doomed. The ratification of the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution which prohibited domestic slavery or involuntary servitude was at war’s end a foregone conclusion, thereby fulfilling Lincoln’s lifelong but long-delayed hope. But the imperatives of equality and liberty did not cease with the end of fighting. There were civil rights and voting rights to be guaranteed, in order that the gift of freedom for millions of Americans not be devoid of promise. But in fact that promise was long delayed, until agitation for equal protection of the laws a century later culminated in the passage of comprehensive civil rights laws.

Given the oppression that slavery and racial segregation uniquely imposed on persons of African descent, it is not surprising that lovers of liberty should continue, for good or for ill, to dedicate themselves to improving the lot of the race so afflicted. Yet it is well to remember that America’s crisis developed precisely because a growing number of its leaders–primarily but not entirely in the South–came to believe that freedom was for white people only. The "domestic" character of slavery, as well as its confinement south of the Mason-Dixon line, tended to place it out of sight and out of mind, enabling Americans outside the South to ignore it. Such, dear readers of this piece, is the plight of unborn children, who are not only primarily a "domestic" matter but completely invisible in their mother’s wombs–however visible their impact on their mother’s bodies.

That the issues of the Civil War should be revisited in our time will surprise–or disturb–only those who believe that they concerned only the place of blacks in American society. But the principles are universal and only incidentally concern race, which is, after all, only an accidental and not an essential attribute of our human nature. It can hardly be doubted that everyone generated by the union of a male and female human being is a human being from the moment of conception. And while the founders (or Lincoln) could not be said to have had the unborn specifically in mind when they dedicated their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to winning independence from a despotic regime, their principles are no respecter of persons. No member or class of the human race can claim a monopoly on liberty and equal rights.

The language of the Declaration of Independence is clear: "All men are created equal." Children are not created at the moment of their birth, but rather nine months prior. However unequipped to exercise or understand their rights (and what child is before his or her majority?) , unborn children are at the very least entitled to equal treatment and freedom from oppression or death at the hands of those nurturing them. With ultrasound technology, we no longer have the excuse of not knowing that children are developing before birth and we see bodily features and movements which settle the question of their humanity.

From the moment the United States Supreme Court issued its infamous decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973, the nation has not been wanting in conscientious citizens who argued for the humanity of unborn children, and thus their entitlement to the law’s protection; and in due course the parallel they saw with the plight of blacks held in slavery. More to the point, an earlier Court, in an equally infamous decision in 1857, Dred Scott v. Sanford, declared that black men had no rights which white men were bound to respect. It galls today’s cast of sensible and not-so-sensible civil rights leaders for anyone to make the comparison between Negroes and unborn children, partly because they fear that it distracts attention from a more compelling issue and partly because they have adopted the feminists’ claim that women’s rights entail the right to an abortion at any time during the entire nine months of pregnancy.

But the founders’ principles and Lincoln’s recurrence to them continue to work out their consequences in the hearts and minds of Americans. Just as the premises "All men are created equal" and "all blacks are men," lead to the conclusion that "all blacks are created equal," so too do the premises, "All men are created equal," and "all unborn children are men," lead to the conclusion that "all unborn children are created equal." We must not be tempted, as the nation was tempted in the mid-nineteenth century, to abandon the faith of our founding fathers. And perhaps we will be spared from paying the heavy price it paid for that apostasy.

Socialist Obama: Could it be?

By Tom Graham - Part 1 During a recent “Meet the Press” the host, with feigned indignation, asked a Senator, “You’re not calling the President a socialist, are you?” Without waiting for a response, he repeated the question for emphasis. This performance highlights the hijacking of political semantics. “Socialist” was replaced by “Liberal” which, in turn, became a pejorative, and now “Progressive” is preferred, and used in titles of dozens of political and welfare advocacy groups. Constantly morphing ideas and permutations of definitions make it hard to compartmentalize politicians. An accepted basic view is that Socialism advocates state or collective ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods. That essential hallmark of freedom, private ownership of property, is prohibited. Note how the current abuses of eminent domain stretch the traditional definitions of public use.

Marx called Socialism a transition between capitalism and Communism. As any high school sophomore should be able to recite from Marx’s Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, “To each according to his needs; from each according to his ability.” An advocate of these ideas is indeed a Socialist. To quote National Socialist German Workers’ Party leader, Adolph Hitler, “The needs of society come before the individual’s needs.”

Before labeling Obama and his inventory of actions, we must also note the academic definition of Communism. “All economic activity is controlled by the state, dominated by a single political party.” Further: “A system based on holding all property in common, with actual ownership by the state.” Differences between the categories, reduced to simplest form: Socialism actually takes ownership while Communism totally controls enterprise, which ostensibly could remain private. This administration’s actions overlap both, with the common goal of doing away with Capitalism. Degrees of success are temporarily limited by public resistance. Constitutional protections are rejected as archaic annoyances.

Obama, equipped with glibness and arrogance, was dismissed as a buffoon by serious economists. His experience was largely limited to preaching Alinsky to ACORN volunteers. Without apologies, he surrounded himself with cabinet and advisor appointees, and a cadre of czars with no accountability, most of whom have serious ethical, legal and moral taints. The czars have no Congressional approval. Uniformly visible in that group is the disturbing tendency to demonize the concepts of private property ownership and free markets. The last 18 presidents averaged 46% of their advisers from the private sector. Obama has 8%.

As perennial presidential candidate Norman Thomas, and others, famously said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation without knowing how it happened.”

Fabianism (strategy of establishing Socialism by gradual means), used with patience by subversive movements world-wide, is not in vogue with this administration.

To some degree or another, The administration has addressed all the elements of the Socialist or Communist state, with varying degrees and a common thread of shrinking Capitalism with alarming speed. The advice of Obama mouthpiece Rahm Emanuel is, “Never miss an opportunity to take advantage of a crisis.” Tactics of Chicago-style patronage, populism and corruption, unabashedly taken to the national level, have caught many flat-footed.

To correct what he blames his predecessor for, “long years of drift,” Obama is moving to control major industries in Communist fashion. What better start than the showpiece of American industry for a century, automobile manufacture? The President has no desire to own the auto companies, merely to control them. Perhaps he has read of the disastrous Soviet attempts at controlling manufacture with bureaucrats making all decisions.

Obama wants control while allowing experienced management to take care of the details. Bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler certainly were never meant to be loans, but rather a grab of equity. The action instantly took 78.3% of General Motors by the government, followed by a gift of 17.5% to the auto workers union. Bond value was whittled down to maybe 10% of GM equity. Investors without rational recognition of Communist control strategy held out hope for a rebound.

A sidebar of the auto industry takeover was the “Cash for Clunkers” fiasco which, at taxpayer expense, amounted to a marginal cost per car of $24,000. It had an effect of about 32 thousandths-of-one-percent CO2 reduction. It stimulated car purchases at the expense of future business a few months down the road. For example, by the end the year, Colorado new car registrations were 29.8% less than last year.