(Dedicated to the Oath-Keepers)
The speech and the trip to Northern California went well, better than I had imagined—and not because I’m some great interlocutor or anything. One of the blessings (for me) contained in the sojourn was that I got to make several new-old friends--like USN veteran Doug Wright and his family. In addition, the reassurance that I am not alone or that those who think and believe as I do are not mere words on a monitor was extremely comforting.
Also, the opportunity to revisit the beauty of the beloved Monterey Peninsula presented itself. Even though I didn’t arrive home until just after 5AM today, the entire trip was well worth it.
Here are some photographs of the event. Since we don’t know whether anyone filmed it, I’m going to recreate the speech tomorrow and post the results--for good or ill--to You Tube. However, since I made such a big deal of the event, I wanted readers to get an idea of the flow of the talk. To that end, here are a few edited notes.
*****
- The Bill of Rights lists rights not
conferred by the government; they’re rights conferred by Natural Law and,
in turn, Natural Law is conferred by Divine Providence.
- Barack Obama calls these ‘negative
rights.’ But they’re
not negative to individual human beings; they’re negative to those who
want to assert power—who want to use government to insert themselves
between the individual and God.
- What many who observe the United States and
its history and don’t get is that, if the Founding Fathers, what they stood for,
their standards and beliefs were so great, why those principles coexisted with so much illiberty
in the land up until the mid twentieth century. Why was there slavery until
1863? Why was there
legislated civil and electoral oppression until the 1950s and 1960s? Answer: because human beings,
their institutions and their adherence to their own professed standards
are imperfect. But
does that mean that standards are useless or that the individual or nation
which has objective standards is a hypocrite?
- Here’s a pertinent comparison: human
beings murder each other. Because
this continues to happen, does that mean that God should have never
legislated that we should not murder? Does that mean that we should not
have secular laws proscribing murder?
- Martin Luther King, his fellows and his
allies petitioned their government for a redress of grievances and said “America, you will live up to
the standards that the Founders of OUR nation spelled out.” Such law existed and America and its government could only say
“oh yeah, right.” What if Dr. King had said the exact same thing but under these
conditions: no law
existed which acknowledged the God-given freedom of this country’s
citizens; instead there was a “constitution” which took the place of
Natural Law? What if there had been no Bill of Rights? See: 2009 Iran.
- Infidelity: When a people and their
government make promises to each other, and one party or another says “hey
I’m breaking all of these promises—I don’t have to keep the promises I
have made to you” then the contract is dissolved and the contract’s penalties
are in effect. We
don’t even want to think about the endgame of a violated and dissolved
marriage between this people and this government. The penalties will be deep, harsh
and horrible. Let’s
not get the point of such a divorce.
- I am the progeny of African and
American slaves, of European and American slave owners, of Native
Americans and of one East African come to America to better his life and
that of his posterity. I was
born in Chicago. That makes me an American, end of
story.
- Disengaged from their foundation, laws
are just window dressing—a pretense of a pretext for a power and resources
grab.
- Original Redemption: This nation can
and has been redeemed because the seeds of its redemption were planted in
its very founding—just like that seed for our redemption as human beings
was planted in creation.
- It is explicitly stated in the
Declaration of Independence that “all men are Created equal” meaning that
all humans were made equally in God’s image. The fact that all humans did not
contemporaneously exist in equality at the time of the Founding does not
diminish this in the least. On the contrary, the statement in the
Founding transcended the existential realities of the time and made
Freedom for all Americans possible.
(Thanks to Thomas Sowell and Mark R. Levin)
