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.