The Declaration of Independence

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

The Legacy of the Declaration of Independence

This Sunday, July 4th, we will once again celebrate our nation’s founding, marking the day in 1776 that the Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence.


The Declaration of Independence was intended to be an official statement explaining why the 13 American colonies had declared their independence from Great Britain. In the years following its passage, however, this statement of principles about the rights of man grew to mean much more.

America became the only country in history founded, as Leo Strauss explained, “in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles,” by which he meant crass, power politics. Instead, America was founded on a set of clearly expressed “self-evident” truths. Thomas Jefferson said the Declaration was “intended to be an expression of the American mind,” and indeed, no document since has so succinctly and so eloquently spelled out the spirit of America.

Our country has evolved out of the timeless truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence to develop a distinct character and set of values that distinguishes us from even other Western democracies.

This holiday, it is worth taking a look at how several key phrases from the Declaration of Independence have served as definitional statements about the aspirations of America, and how those words of our Founding Fathers’ have affected America in the 234 years since they were written.

“…all men are created equal”
The Founding Fathers who authored the Declaration were the first people in the history of the world ever to express our natural equality as a principle of government in such an unqualified way. Though neither the Constitution that followed nor the Founders personally quite fulfilled the promise of those words, it has since been the project of our country to accomplish them.
America came though to recognize that we are not all literally equal—we are born with different capabilities and attributes, and to different stations in life—the words of the founders capture the truth that we must treat each other as equals. We are “created equal” in the sense that all men (and, we now recognize, all women) have the same natural rights, granted to them by God. We are all the same under the law.
This powerful statement of universal rights was used by abolitionists as a moral cudgel to rid the United States of slavery, an institution explicitly at odds with the truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln consistently evoked the phrase in his famous Peoria speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and later during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. As President, Lincoln again included the phrase in the Gettysburg Address as the moral underpinning by which the union should be rededicated. Later, during the women’s suffrage movement and civil rights struggles of the 1960s, leaders such as Martin Luther King used the powerful phrase as a reminder to America that separate (treating people differently under the law based on their race) was not equal.

Leaders such as Lincoln and King believed that as America’s founding political document, the Declaration of Independence is our moral guide with which to interpret the Constitution. They saw that we cannot divorce the law from the moral underpinnings that legitimize it.

But by what authority does that moral underpinning exist?

“…endowed by their Creator”

The core contention of the Declaration of Independence and the principle of natural rights upon which America was founded is that there is a higher moral order upon which the laws of man must be based. The Declaration asserts the existence of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” which had a clear meaning in 18th Century England and America. It referred to the will of God as displayed by the natural order of the world.

John Locke, who was widely read by the leaders of colonial America, wrote in his Second Treatise on Government: “Thus the law of nature stands as an eternal rule of all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions, must ... be conformable to the law of nature, i.e., to the will of God.”

William Blackstone, who was arguably the single greatest influence on the creation of the American legal system, wrote in Commentaries on the Laws of England, “As man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should at all points conform to his maker’s will.”

America’s founding was heavily influenced by the English and Scottish enlightenment, which specifically included a space for God and religion in its conceptions of rights, freedom and human reason. This gave the American Revolution a distinctly different character than the French Revolution, which in its most radical phase sought freedom by casting off all authority and remnants of the existing order -- especially God.

In the American formulation as declared by our founders, man’s rights come from God, not from man’s ability to “reason” them into existence. Man does not depend on government to grant him rights through a bureaucratic process, but instead to secure those rights that have been granted to him by God.

In other words, power comes from God, to you, which is then loaned to government.

Thus, the Declaration states, “That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The English and Scottish enlightenment’s conscious inclusion of a space for God and religion had another key influence on the American system of government. Whereas the French Revolution believed it could create a “new man” through government education and indoctrination, the American Founding Fathers had a profound sense of the fallen nature of man. Thus, they created a system of checks and balances that would serve as a restraint on those in power.

“…the pursuit of happiness”

Here again we see the influence of the English and Scottish enlightenment on the Founding Fathers. For writers such as John Locke and Francis Hutcheson, the term “happiness” meant something close to “wisdom and virtue.” It did not mean hedonism or other shallow pleasures as the term is too often confused to mean today.

It is also essential to note that the Declaration does not say that we have a right to have happiness provided to us. It says we have the right to pursue happiness – an active verb. As I point out in jest to audiences in my speeches, the Declaration says nothing about a right to redistribution of happiness. It says nothing about happiness stamps. It does not say some people can be too happy and that government should make them less happy out of a sense of fairness.
The Founding Fathers understood that government could not give people happiness, that it was instead up to government to create an environment where the people could best work to achieve their dreams. As AEI’s Arthur Brooks has pointed out, polls of wealthy and successful people show that the harder one works for that success, the greater happiness one derives from it.

America is a land where through hard work, determination, and entrepreneurialism, people can achieve their big dreams. The right of “the pursuit of happiness” spelled out in the Declaration is a definitional statement about the nature of America that has attracted people from all over the world to come here to pursue those dreams.

Who We Are This July 4th

A bedrock belief of American conservatism is a respect for the established traditions and values of American culture. Conservatives believe from the time the first colonists landed in Jamestown, America took on a unique culture and set of values that have set us apart from our European cousins: a belief in natural rights, strong religious faith and values, the importance of the work ethic, and a spirit of community that manifests itself in a belief in limited government and strong civic participation. It is this set of beliefs – truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence – that have made America so successful, and they deserve to be protected.

The modern Left – what I describe in my book To Save America as a “secular-socialist machine” – is using every lever of power at its disposal to dismantle our unique American civilization and replace it with a secular, bureaucratic culture in which government is big, citizens are small, and our rights are defined by the state rather than endowed by our Creator. Equality under the law is being discarded in favor of equality of results; consent of the governed is being subverted by an increasingly overbearing federal bureaucracy and imperial judiciary; and the pursuit of happiness is being undermined by a redistributive welfare state that kills the can-do, entrepreneurial spirit of America.
This July 4th, I hope you will take time to read the Declaration of Independence and consider the truths about our rights and freedoms contained within. I hope you will take time to appreciate the sacrifices made by the founding generation and generations since to secure our liberty.
But most of all, I hope you will take time to appreciate the greatness of America and how hard we must be willing to work to preserve that which makes it so special.
Happy Independence Day.
 
WRITTEN BY: Newt Gingrich and original article available by clicking on the title of this blog entry

July 4, 1826

Randall Stephens

It was fifty years to the day after the 13 colonies declared independence from Great Britain.

President John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary about the festivities in Washington. "The volunteer companies assembled on the square," he observed, "fronting the house and paid the passing salute by marching through the yard."

Arriving at the door of the Capitol, I was there met by Mr. Anderson, the Comptroller, with whom we entered the hall of the House of Representatives. The Reverend Mr. Ryland made an introductory prayer.

Joseph Anderson, the Comptroller, read the Declaration of Independence; Walter Jones delivered an oration commemorative of the fiftieth anniversary; the Reverend Mr. Post, Chaplain of H. R. U. S., made a concluding prayer.

After which, Governor Barbour delivered an address to the citizens assembled, soliciting subscriptions for the relief of Mr. Jefferson. . .

News traveled slowly over bad roads. Members of congress knew of Jefferson's troubles, but the severity of his situation was unclear. Few could have guessed that Jefferson's one-time rival and on-again/off-again friend John Adams was also in his last throes. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on that hot July day.

Four days later John Quincy received a batch of letters. One brought bad news. A missive "from my brother, written on the morning of the 4th, announcing that, in the opinion of those who surrounded my father's couch, he was rapidly sinking; that they were sending an express for my son in Boston, who might perhaps arrive in time to receive his last breath. The third was from my brother's wife to her daughter Elizabeth to the same purport, and written in much distress." On his way north to Boston, while in Waterloo, MD, he heard that his father had died. It was July 9th. He was stricken with grief. "My father had nearly closed the ninety-first year of his life," he confided to his diary, "a life illustrious in the annals of his country and of the world."

He had served to great and useful purpose his nation, his age, and his God. He is gone, and may the blessing of Almighty Grace have attended him to his account! I say not, May my last end be like his!—it were presumptuous. The time, the manner, the coincidence with the decease of Jefferson, are visible and palpable marks of Divine favor, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe. For myself, all that I dare to ask is, that I may live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came, and, at the appointed hour of my Maker, die as my father has died, in peace with God and man, sped to the regions of futurity with the blessings of my fellow-men.

Plenty of Americans in 1826 had something to say about the death of two lions of the Revolution. Prone to view the world through the eyes of faith, and to read signs in the sky and on the ground, newspaper editors, clergy, and laypeople were astounded. On July 11 the Massachusetts Salem Gazette lamented "We know not in what language to express ourselves in announcing . . . another event which has transpired to render the late glorious anniversary, the national jubilee, in some respects the most memorable day in the history of our country." That was no hollow encomium. It rang true across the young nation. The New York Commercial Advertiser rhapsodized: "it seems as though Divine Providence had determined that the spirits of these great men, which were kindled at the same altar, and glowed with the same patriotic fervor . . . should be united in death, and travel into the unknown regions of eternity together!"

Some years back Margaret P. Battin wrote in Historically Speaking about the strange coincidence of Jefferson's and Adam's deaths on the same day. "Although the fact that Adams and Jefferson died the same day is taught to practically every schoolchild, asking why is not," Battin noted. "What could explain this? There are at least six principal avenues to explore, but all of them raise further issues." She then offered some of the explanations given over the ages for their demise on that same anniversary.

It makes me wonder about the comparison and contrast between our age and the beginning of the Jacksonian era. Do Americans now have similar ideas linking nation, patriotism, and providence? Do Americans esteem their leaders and the political giants of our day in any way like they did 184 years ago? How have citizens understood God and country from one era to the next?

Working with the Papers of Thomas Jefferson and TJ as a Window into the Varieties of Early American Experience

Bland Whitley

Given that I’m new to both historical editing and the intensive study of Thomas Jefferson (about eight months on the job), I feel a bit unqualified to write about the work of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson. So what follows is something of a hybrid between the perspective of an outlier and that of an insider. The Papers, as some may know, consist of correspondence (incoming and outgoing) and other writings of our nation’s much celebrated and much deprecated third president and polymath. The project has made the lives of researchers easier by collecting all of Jefferson’s known papers, which are scattered among many archives and private collectors, into carefully annotated chronological volumes. Volume 36, which covers the months from December 1801 to March 1802, is now in press, while the first 33 volumes are now available online through UVA Press’s Rotunda imprint.

In researching and annotating documents, precision is essential. Transcriptions are verified against the originals to ensure accuracy. Supporting evidence is assessed carefully—if we are not reasonably certain of a given fact’s accuracy, it will not appear. If an interesting point or idea is not relevant to the document in question, we have to ignore it and move on. It’s not for nothing that documentary editing has been characterized as nuts-and-bolts, or blue-collar history. As much care and hard research goes into providing the context of particular documents, the goal always remains making Jefferson’s papers readily available and comprehensible to readers and researchers. Although like all documentary editors we must be engaged with the latest historiography, not just on Jefferson, but on seemingly the entire range of early American history, it is not necessarily our role to participate in the historiographical debates that tend to define the parameters of contemporary scholarship.

And there can be little doubt that Jefferson, or TJ as we know him, inspires more impassioned debates than any other founder. From reveries spun from his soaring rhetoric to anguish over his failure to extend the ideals embedded in his singular prose (a sub-genre that seemingly demands pairing with the adjective “Jeffersonian”) to anyone other than white men, he has become the catalyst of our own musings about America’s founding contradictions. That he likely carried on a long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves and quite possibly the half-sister of his dead wife, has only added to this racial (and now gendered) dramaturgy. Of course, fascination with TJ goes beyond these ideological concerns. As anyone who visits Monticello can attest, Jefferson the tinkerer and inventor (and he was certainly more the former than the latter) may be his most enduring image. His technical prowess only reinforces a sense that TJ can serve as a stand-in for the early American character—he is at once egalitarian and racist, nationalistic and provincial, visionary and practical (thus the constant tinkering). Presenting TJ, the binary code of early America.

That’s something of my outlier’s perspective but one to which I still partially subscribe. I say partially because although working on the Papers has deepened my appreciation of TJ’s multi-faceted nature, it has made me more leery of the ideological work that his image continues to allow commentators of all stripes to perform. One of the real virtues of a comprehensive documentary edition is that it places us students of history in the flow of events. It’s as close to a real time presentation of early American history as one can probably achieve. For this student, that heightens the sense that the set of wise men at the center of our story (TJ, Albert Gallatin, James Madison—our current volumes cover the presidency) had both a clear mission and understanding of what they wanted to accomplish but also had to muddle along, responding to contingencies as anyone else might. They appear as both the authors and subjects of events. One could certainly use the documents in our volumes to explore the binary TJ of the previous paragraph: the idealistic republican v. the hard-nosed, partisan Republican, the advocate for yeoman farmers v. the defender of planter slaveholders, and so on. But it’s even more evident to me, now, that laying all of these weighty themes at TJ’s feet and presenting him as either the hero of democracy or as America’s original sinner can be counter-productive. Nor does it represent the work that the Papers project performs.

Julian P. Boyd the founding editor of the TJ Papers, might have disagreed. The last five volumes that he produced served as platforms for his original and highly partisan analyses of TJ’s place in early America (central and exalted, one might say). And while the end of Boyd’s tenure became notorious for the slow pace of publication that his mini-monograph explications mandated (a pace I’ll point out is no longer a characteristic), it is the aggressive analytical posture that seems to me most problematic. With so many documents to and from Jefferson, which can and do speak for themselves (often with a push from the project editors’ annotations), there is little need to use the Papers as a platform to defend or attack Jefferson. The documents will naturally inform the more pointed analyses of other scholars, but in our work here we neither damn nor praise the man. Rather, it seems more appropriate to use TJ as a window into the varieties of early American experience.

And what a window! I won’t claim TJ as some kind of magic key, but I know of no other early American figure who can put a student into contact with so many different aspects of that period. During my short tenure, I have helped research and annotate documents concerning such topics as improvements in steel-yards, or weight balances, the efforts of Quakers to provide education for African-American children, the late career of English scientist and religious dissenter Joseph Priestley, some of Jefferson’s slaves, smallpox vaccination, tobacco marketing, the variable quality of Virginia hams, the invention of the lifeboat, and the early American publishing and bookselling industry. Even while president when he was often consumed by party-building, patronage requests, and foreign policy, Jefferson retained his diverse interests. And because people recognized him as a man of science and learning, he attracted correspondence on an enormous range of subjects.

It is this variety that keeps me excited throughout the workday. And it also points out the irony of this project. Jefferson is absolutely at the center of our little scholarly kingdom (er, I mean republic). The project is defined by documents that emanated from his pen or passed through his hands. Yet, for me its greatest value is the light it casts on the various people, objects, ideas, and events with which TJ engaged. Perhaps that merely reflects my training during a period that prized decentering and debunking the “great white men.” I’ll own up to that. But it also seems to me that the vastness of documentary projects such as ours precludes (or at least should) the kind of narrative coherence that a tight analysis requires. What such editions achieve is not a biography in documents. Rather, they foster multifaceted, sometimes chaotic, portraits of the social milieus in which the primary subjects and their peers acted.

For students of Jefferson (detractors, boosters, and others) the Papers project remains an unparalleled resource. Yet anyone interested in some small corner of the early republic can profitably consult its volumes. And the same might be said for documentary projects of all stripes. Don’t think of them as limited by their primary subjects, however rich and contentious.

Religion and Politics Don't Mix?

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." --Thomas Jefferson

For all of our nation's history, there have been tactical battles between opposing political ideologies -- liberals (leftists) who want to liberate us from constitutional rule of law, and conservatives who strive to conserve rule of law. Great political capital has been, and continues to be, expended by the Left in order to offend our Constitution, and by the Right in order to defend it.

Amid the din and rhetoric of the current lineup of tactical contests, I ask that you venture up to the strategic level and consider a primal issue that transcends all the political noise.

How many times have you heard the rejoinder, "Religion and politics don't mix"?

Most Americans have, for generations now, been inculcated (read: "dumbed down") by the spurious "wall of separation" metaphor and believe that it is a legitimate barrier between government and religion. So effective has been this false indoctrination that even some otherwise erudite conservatives fail to recall that religion and politics not only mix, but are inseparable.

Recall that our Founders affirmed in the Declaration of Independence "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

In other words, our Creator bestowed the rights enumerated in our Declaration and, by extension, as codified in its subordinate guidance, our Constitution. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are natural rights; they are not gifts from government.

To that end, Alexander Hamilton wrote, "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

But the Left has, for many decades, made its primary objective the eradication of God from every public quarter, and routinely relied on judicial activism to undermine constitutional rule of law and, thus, the natural rights of man.

The intended consequence of this artificial barrier between church and state is to remove knowledge of our Creator from all public forums and, thus, over time, to disabuse belief in a sovereign God and the natural rights He has endowed.

This erosion of knowledge about the origin of our rights has dire implications for the future of liberty.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."

As the author of our Declaration of Independence makes clear, we should all tremble that man has adulterated the gifts of God.

Ironically, it was Jefferson who penned the words "wall of separation between church and state" in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

Jefferson was responding to a letter the Association wrote to him objecting to Connecticut's establishment of Congregationalism as its state church. Jefferson responded that the First Amendment prohibited the national (federal) government from establishing a "national church."

After all, the controlling language (Amendment I) reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Jefferson concluded rightly that the Constitution's 10th Amendment federalism provision prohibited the national government from interfering with matters of state governments -- a "wall of separation," if you will, between the federal government and state governments.

Among all our Founders, Jefferson was most adamant in his objection to the construct of the Judicial Branch of government in the proposed Constitution, writing, "The Constitution [would become] a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please."

Jefferson warned: "The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch. ... It has long been my opinion ... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped."

Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 81, "[T]here is not a syllable in the [Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."

But Jefferson was correct in his apprehension about our Constitution being treated as "a mere thing of wax" by what he called the "despotic branch," who would do the bidding of their special-interest constituencies rather than interpret the plain language of the Constitution.

In 1947, Justice Hugo Black perverted Jefferson's words when Black speciously opined in the majority opinion of Everson v. Board of Education that the First Amendment created a "wall of separation" between religion and government, thus opening the floodgates for subsequent opinions abolishing religious education and expression in all public forums.

John Adams wrote, "If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave."

It may not be in the power of man to alienate the gift of liberty, but it will certainly take the power of men, guided by our Creator, to defend it. To that end, religion and politics are inseparable.

WRITTEN by Mark Alexander and presented in his Federalist Society emailing dated May 14th, 2009

God and Country

Of course it's purely a hypothetical question if you live in America or most any free nation, but if you simply had to make a choice, which would you choose: God, or country? If you're someone who is among the tiny minority of Americans who doesn't believe in God to begin with, it's an easy question. And if you're one of those who loves God completely but has little faith or confidence in any government, then it's probably an easy choice for you as well. But the vast majority of Americans would find this a difficult question with which to wrestle. Your first inclination would be to say something like "There's no way that would ever happen here in the U.S., so I don't even have to worry about it." Perhaps true. When the United States of America publicly issued its Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776, the document began: "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..." The Declaration goes on to famously state: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The document, written by Thomas Jefferson, was signed with affirment by him, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and leaders from all 13 original colonies. So the United States at its founding was a nation of believers. Then in what is commonly known as the 'Bill of Rights', the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1791 guaranteed "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." What the authors were striving for was tolerance, not abolition of religion from society. So you would seem to have a pretty solid backing to believe that you shouldn't ever have to worry about being forced to make such a choice. But the fact is, those words were written and spoken in the past, and we are talking about a hypothetical future. Think it can't happen in actuality? Then you simply haven't been paying attention to the history of the world. One thing that you can most certainly count on in the future is change, and for anyone to say they know where that change is going to take us in the next few centuries, even just in the next few decades, would be extremely presumptuous and naive. So just play along. Something happens, and you are forced to make that choice: God or country. The likely way such a choice would come is from the country end of things. Some entity coming to power and telling you that you may worship no God, or must worship some particular version of God, or else you have to leave the country (or worse.) In the Bible, the last years of mankind on earth are filled with this type of individual, personal decision in the Book of Revelation. You will be forced to choose between God and the ruling power manifest by Satan, and the immediate price of choosing incorrectly will be your life. In his own life, Jesus Christ spoke of the relevance of government in the Gospel of Luke: "Give to the emperor the thing's that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's". This famous 'render unto Caesar' statement shows that the Lord understood and supported that there was a need for government of men by men. I would say that if you are ever forced into such a choice, then you only have one decision to make - choose God. That means even if you have to die for your choice. Because no government worth living in would force such a choice on you, and none is worth the price of your immortal and eternal soul. Now for some, the choice might come from God Himself. For reasons only he may fully appreciate, you may be called to some action or to take some position that runs counter to that of your official American government position. And when I say 'called', I mean 'called by God' in a manner that leaves you no doubt as to the origin of the call to action. In that case, you most certainly need to choose to do or say whatever it is that God is calling you to. There is every probability that His reasons go to a message that He wants delivered through you to the rest of mankind. The bottom line is that you should always choose God over country, and the simple reason is that your country, the United States of America, was formed with the blessings of God and inspired by His Word. God came first, His will and power are greater. You will be subject to the laws, rules, customs, and opinions of your countrymen for a few decades. You will answer to God for eternity. So while there is no choice to make, while America remains a God-fearing, God-loving nation in most hearts, continue to fight with everything that is in you and pray with everything you have that this status continues. But if one day the situation changes, and it all falls apart, be sure that you are ready to make the right decision. The correct choice will always be the choice for God.