Our Municipal Father in Heaven, Part 2

Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?

“You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.”

I hope you weren’t sensing contempt from me. It wasn’t your belief that surprised me so much as how boldly you expressed it.

“I was offended by that. I really was.”

(From the New York News & Politics Interview: In Conversation: Antonin Scalia)

So Justice Antonin Scalia, a devout Catholic Christian deciding cases on the United States Supreme Court, was mightily offended by a non-believer expressing mild surprise about his religious beliefs.

It just goes to show us how easily people’s tender sensibilities can become offended when it comes to matters of religion, even in a private setting, and, of course, that much more so in a government context when the government is actually promoting religion.

If I were a devout Christian, (like Justice Scalia and the vast majority of my fellow Americans), one who fervently believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, that He is God, was born of a virgin, sent by God the Father as the only savior of mankind from eternal damnation, crucified as the ultimate sacrifice to atone for our sins, resurrected from death and ascended into heaven, I would likewise be offended if my municipal government sponsored religious prayers at town meetings which were not Christian prayers.

If I were like most Christians in America, I would welcome government sponsorship, promotion and support of monotheistic religion in general and Christianity in particular. But -- I would take particular offense to any government sponsored prayer that failed at a minimum to recognize Jesus Christ as God. If I were a Catholic, I might be offended by Protestant style prayers. If I were a Protestant, Catholic prayers might offend me.

Muslim, Jewish, Pagan, Wiccan or Mormon prayers would definitely offend my religious sensibilities even though I know that many of those folks probably believe in the same God I do.  I would think that the government has no business promoting those kinds of religions because doing so plainly violates the First Amendment Establishment Clause. 

Moreover, I’d be profoundly offended, enraged to put it mildly, if the town mayor invited an atheist to deliver a government sponsored invocation which called upon those in attendance to stand, bow their heads, and give thanks for the fact that all gods are imaginary and therefore we must steadfastly rely upon logic and reason alone to guide our important government decisions.

Well, of course, anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Christian; they know that I’m a fierce defender of the Establishment Clause because I’m convinced that government is public and religion is private therefore neither should be allowed to interfere with the other. There must be judicially enforced separation between Church and State for the proper constitutional protection of both.

Unfortunately our United States Supreme Court doesn’t quite see it that way. In 1983 it held, for example, (6-3) as a matter of historical context that it is perfectly proper, and not violative of the Establishment Clause, for a state legislature to hire a Christian chaplain at taxpayer expense whose job is to conduct sectarian Christian prayers at every opening session of that government body.

The United States Congress has been doing exactly the same thing for well over 200 years now reasoned the majority. The very first Congress that made the Establishment Clause the law of the land promptly hired a Christian chaplain to conduct sectarian Christian prayers at legislative sessions. Apparently no one was offended by that then so the practice continues to this day with the explicit sanction of the highest court in the land.

We all know, however, that the First Amendment Establishment Clause is hardly the only provision in the Bill of Rights that Congress and the government have been violating repeatedly from day one.

The Fifth Amendment, for instance, supposedly guarantees equal protection of the law and that no person shall be deprived of liberty or property without due process of law. Tell that to the slaves and the blacks who didn’t fully own and enjoy the rights to equal protection and due process until more than 150 years after the Bill of Rights became law and nearly 70 years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.

In Part 1 of this essay, Our Municipal Father in Heaven, I boldly predicted citing several compelling reasons why the five current Christian Catholic Justices on SCOTUS will once again throw the Establishment Clause under the constitutional bus for the purpose of sanctioning government sponsored sectarian Christian prayers at the municipal level of American government.

I’ve just now read the transcript of oral arguments before the court in the current case. As a libertarian and defender of the First Amendment it offers me no reason for optimism. SCOTUS is probably going to use the same reasoning above – 5 to 4 this time I predict -- to stamp its judicial seal of approval for government sponsored Christian prayers at municipal sessions.

After all, the President of the United States, Congress, and prominent members of both major American political parties have each filed legal briefs with the Court formally requesting SCOTUS to sanction municipal government Christian prayers.

Of course they have. They represent the vast majority of Christians who want the government to support, promote and sponsor their religion. They don’t give a damn about the minorities which the Constitution was written to protect. All they care about is placating their constituents.

Even the lawyer who argued my side of the case, to my utter astonishment, caved in almost completely conceding that government sponsored prayer is permissible – “as long as the prayers aren’t overly sectarian in nature” – he lamely argued.

Too bad though that the conservative Justices plainly indicated that they aren’t especially inclined to involve themselves in the business of censoring or determining the content of government prayers.

This lawyer even went so far as to concede that the Court can ignore the sensibilities of non-believers or pantheistic believers when fashioning their rationale allowing government sponsored prayers.

Yes, the Court understands and will perhaps try to formulate a decision allowing government sponsored prayers which might mitigate any potential offence to Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and other monotheists, but a substantial non-believer minority in America will be forced to endure a clear violation of their constitutional First Amendment rights in perpetuity.

That’s because, in spite of the Establishment Clause, we Americans have an establishment of monotheistic religion and an official government God in America. He’s engraved on all of our coins, our currency, in our national motto and pledge of allegiance.

Our elected government officials, bureaucrats, agents and employees at every level of government bow their heads in prayer to this God every day and ask us all to do the same during the performance of government functions. They don’t care who is offended or whether anyone has a right to be offended.

Justice Scalia can be offended but atheists cannot. As far as he and his SCOTUS are concerned we are all, believers and non-believers alike, expected to bow our collective heads and pray to our government God: Our Municipal Father in Heaven. 

US Constitution Illegal in Modesto

What better evidence is there today that America has morphed into a statist police state than this example of a California college which actually bars its own students from exercising free speech on campus, including handing out free copies of the United States Constitution?

That’s right. On September 17, 2013 – Constitution Day in America – a student interested in starting an organization called Young Americans for Liberty at Modesto Junior College was accosted by the campus police for the “crime” of peaceably passing out pocket-size pamphlets of the Constitution to fellow students.

The cop escorted 25-year-old student Robert Van Tuinen to a school administrative office where an official showed him a binder with “rules governing free speech” on campus. He was admonished that that there is only one small designated place “in front of the student center, in that little cement area,” where free expression is allowed, but that two people are already using it.

“You’d have to wait,” croaked the statist. “You could go on (Sept.) 20th, the 27th or you can go into October.” Then he was advised to make an appointment with the vice president of student services for further explanation of the “rules.”

"It was a tense situation," recalls Van Tuinen. "To be told I can't do something as basic as handing out the Constitution was frustrating."

“Watching the video [that Van Tuinen recorded of the entire incident] is a combination of depressing and nauseating, to see what rigmarole students have to go through just to express themselves on campus,” declared Robert Shibley, senior vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has taken on campus speech codes around the nation.

“They [the rules] are imposed in an attempt to sanitize the public space of anything that might offend somebody.” Shibley added. “The fact is, no school specifically needs a speech code. They have the ability keep order on campus. Of people are too loud, harassing people, or blocking traffic they have the means to address that.”

This sad story just makes me wonder out load about to what part of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights which guarantees free speech do these statist college campus administrative officials not understand.

The government “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech,” period. No law literally means no law; no rule; no prohibition; no abridgment; no infringement; no exception; no nothing.

No means no!

But in a police state, like we have in California and the rest of America today, no means no constitutional rights because the:

US Constitution is illegal in Modesto.

Blowback

When Adolph Hitler and his homicidal gang of Nazi thugs transformed Germany into a noxious police state there were still a tiny minority of the oppressed German citizens who covertly resisted the outrage with heroic acts of defiance, sabotage, and outright murder.

Yes, there were many instances in which Nazi party officials, SS officers and Gestapo goons were brutally assassinated by disgruntled Germans who hated what they were doing to their beloved nation. Hitler himself narrowly missed death at the hands of his own countrymen on several occasions.

Today we immortalize those brave resisters in our history books as heroes, and our admiration for them is well deserved. They stood up to the parasitical monster’s oppressing them and risked their lives for any opportunity to take them down. Few people today will recall any sympathy for the Gestapo. They lived by the sword and deserved to die by it.

There is no safe refuge for hated monster political oppressors of this world. They might as well display targets on their backs as they go about conducting their nasty business. Sooner or later someone who hates them, someone who doesn’t care about the consequences, will find an opportunity to strike back.

It’s called blowback.

That’s exactly what we saw last Friday at Los Angeles International Airport's Terminal 3, when a 23-year-old man, identified by the FBI as Paul Anthony Ciancia, armed with an assault rifle, went on a murderous rampage targeting TSA officers.

“Why did he do it?” says the headline.

It really doesn’t take a genius to figure that out in my humble opinion.  

This was blowback.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning what this guy did. I don’t believe in solving problems with violence. But I can certainly understand why he did it. He hates the United States government – especially the TSA -- and he was looking for revenge.

He had enough ammunition to "have literally killed everyone in that terminal," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti observed. But he apparently wasn’t after everyone or just anyone. He was targeting only TSA officers.  

Witnesses described how the gunman was asking people: "Hey, are you TSA?" If they said "no," he would move on. One man said that he had just seen the gunman "calmly" shoot a TSA officer and then walked toward him asking: "TSA?" "I just shook my head," said the witness, "And he kept going."

Gee, why would anybody hate the United States government?

Why would anybody hate and want to target the TSA?

Why would anyone hate Adolph Hitler and his Third Reich?

Why would anyone hate and want to target the Gestapo?

Blowback!

Punishing Liberty

It’s big news in the American media this week that Christians in Iran are being sentenced to 80 lashes with the whip for the “crime” of drinking wine as part of their religious communion sacrament -- “a shocking punishment meted out even as a new United Nations report blasted the Islamic republic for its systematic persecution of non-Muslims.”

Well yes, it is indeed a shocking punishment of liberty, imposed by savages stuck within a 7^th century mindset, but that is what we can expect with any government of savages, run by savages for savages. This is exactly the kind of thing all barbarous statist and religious savages do to the hapless multitudes under their domination and control.

Four Christians were arrested in a house church and charged with consuming alcohol in violation of the government theocracy's strict laws. Iran is a place where the “crime” of converting from Islam to another religion can commonly result in the death penalty. The clerical rulers there see Christianity as a threat to Iran’s majority ultra-orthodox Shiite Islamic religion.

Understand that when any authoritarian rulers within a group of religious fanatics begin to doubt their own faith in the imaginary dogma, they resort to cracking down on others who decide to leave the fold. If you don’t happen to accept their brand of religion they see that as a threat to their existence.

Americans see it as a human rights and freedom of religion issue. “It should be no surprise that Iran’s human rights record as documented by the UN is nothing short of atrocious," observes Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "If the regime thinks that its international charm offensive will help whitewash its appalling human rights record as documented by the UN report, they are sorely mistaken.”

“The sentences handed down to these members of the Church of Iran effectively criminalize the Christian sacrament of sharing in the Lord’s Supper and constitute an unacceptable infringement on the right to practice faith freely and peaceably,” explains Mervyn Thomas, chief executive of Christian Solidarity Worldwide.

Yes, but this story isn’t confined to just a Christian thing. If any self respecting Muslim man residing in the savage nation of Iran is caught enjoying an alcoholic beverage, he’s going to get the same 80 lashes from the whip.

The Christians in this story were not punished for being Christians – there are some 370,000 Christians lawfully living in savage land – they’re being punished for drinking alcohol.

The Iranians are punishing liberty as a crime.

Does that sound familiar?

It should, because that is exactly what the government of the United States of America does.

Americans once suffered under the same kind of alcohol prohibition laws. Folks weren’t sentenced to 80 lashes from the whip then but they often received stiff jail or prison sentences which were every bit as much draconian.

Our government routinely sentences innocent people even today for the “crime” of ingesting substances that the authorities have deemed by fiat illegal.  We have our own War on Drugs and the victims are filling up American prisons to overcrowding. It was done with alcohol in the early 20^th century just as its being done with other recreational drugs today.

Would some of these innocent prisoners rather endure 80 lashes by the whip and go free as opposed to suffering a lengthy prison term? The prison experience seems a far worse human rights violation by my reckoning.

By my reckoning the United States government is just as downright savage to its people as the government of Iran when it comes to punishing liberty.

Government Gunslingers

The United States military, Secret Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation are not the only government entities packing heat nowadays. Far from it; America has become a police state and that means that there are government gunslingers just about everywhere.

That’s right. Today there are at least 70 federal government entities which have armed divisions employing about 120,000 full-time officers authorized to carry guns and make arrests according to a June 2012 Justice Department report.

Now even the Library of Congress, National Institute of Health and Federal Reserve Board, among several other non-law-enforcement type agencies, are employing armed gunslingers ready to riddle the sheep with bullets at the slightest perceived provocation.

In short, our government has armed itself for protection against the very people it is charged with serving and protecting.

That is the hallmark of a police state.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, is just another fully armed federal police force. 

Recently they descended in full force and body armor upon the tiny Alaskan gold mining town of Chicken, together with a team of several other armed federal and state officials, including the FBI, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Coast Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Park Service.

It was part of an Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force investigation to look for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.

EPA officials deny that the operation was a “raid.”

“Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say "POLICE" emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms,” said one gold miner of the incident.

These pollution police are treating clean water violations nowadays in the same fashion as bank robberies or kidnappings.

"Environmental law enforcement, like other forms of law enforcement, always involves the potential for physical, even armed, confrontation," said an EPA spokesman in defense of the Chicken Alaska raid.

Of course; when government goons engage in violent physical armed confrontations with people, they should expect some level of physical violence in return. On the other hand, if they would simply investigate peacefully and issue court citations to violators, they would have no need to arm themselves to the teeth.

Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell has ordered an investigation, saying: "This level of intrusion and intimidation of Alaskans is absolutely unacceptable."

Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Republican, and Mark Begich, Democrat, have also inquired about the incident. “This seems to have been a heavy-handed and heavy-armor approach. Why was it so confrontational? The EPA really didn’t have any good answers for this,” Murkowski observed.

North Carolina resident Larry Keller was visited by armed EPA agents in May 2012 after sending an email complaining to the regional administrator who was video-taped saying his enforcement strategy was to "crucify" executives from big oil and gas companies. "The charter of the EPA is to protect the environment and public, not to act as a quasi federal police department," Keller told them after they challenged his conduct as suspicious.

You see, in a police state, such as what we have in American today, the police will come to your door fully armed to investigate and intimidate you for the suspicious “crime” of registering a complaint against one of them.

Our nation has become a government of gunslingers. 

American Welfare Program for Terrorists

The United States government has been generously supplying its avowed enemies with welfare packages during the entire War on Terror. Americans have armed the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, terrorist insurgents in Iraq, and Al Qaeda aligned rebel groups in Syria.  

Now we learn that our military geniuses have ‘donated’ huge amounts of expensive, highly sophisticated and sensitive military weapons and equipment to terrorist aligned militia groups in Libya.

Actually the stuff was just left lying around so that the enemy could conveniently swipe it. Hundreds of U.S. military weapons which were used for training by U.S. Special Forces in Libya are now in the hands of terrorists thanks to the War on Terror. The U.S. military training team was pulled and the weapons left behind as a gift.

The loot includes dozens of highly sophisticated armored vehicles called GMV's, featuring state of the art GPS navigation devices, various sets of weapon mounts which can be outfitted with smoke-grenade launchers. Hundreds of Glock pistols, M4 rifles, and every set of advanced technology night-vision goggles have also disappeared.

"It's not just equipment ... it's the capability. You are giving these very dangerous groups the capability that only a few nations are capable of," one Fox News source said. "Already assassinations are picking up in Tripoli and there are major worries that the militias are using this stolen equipment to their advantage. All these militias are tied into terrorist organizations…"

This directly endangers the U.S.-supported government in Libya and the concern is that the equipment is now going to be used by these groups in an attempt to overthrow the government and install a more hard-line Muslim leadership. In short, the stuff we supplied the terrorists is going to be used against us.

"The European ambassador was attacked and we are now commonly seeing robbing and attacking of people in broad daylight. ... This isn't perception, this is actually happening," said another anonymous source, referring to an August incident where an escort vehicle for the European Union ambassador was attacked in Tripoli.

A U.S.-developed training camp on the outskirts of Tripoli has now been taken over by one of these militia groups who are hoarding weapons. The worry is that this camp, abandoned by U.S. trainers within the last month, is being used in preparation for an attack on the new Libyan government.

You see, America brings in huge and expensive quantities of weapons and equipment into enemy territory and then just abandons the stuff again and again.

Training camps throughout eastern Libya continue to train terrorists, and border controls right now around the country are non-existent in most areas. "The theft of these weapons and the open borders are feeding Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and threatens Libya's neighbors as well. It's already bad. ... and now it's really bad."

No wonder the War on Terror is never-ending.

Our government is supporting the enemy.

It’s our American welfare program for terrorists.

American Dream: Not About Money

The so-called American Dream has been slowly and steadily diminishing in the hearts, minds and lives of all Americans over the last century, and this tragic situation has very little to do with money.

News media reports of two studies released this month, however, ostensibly “point to a troubling demographic shift that puts the American Dream out of reach for an increasing number of U.S. citizens, especially children.”

The Southern Education Foundation found that, for the first time in 40 years, the majority of public school students in 13 southern and four western states are living at poverty levels. "We've had very slow economic growth, and particularly falling real wages for workers with less experience and less education for more than 30 years. So, this is a long trend in the making," explains Russell Sage Foundation president Sheldon Danziger.

Another study by the group Opportunity Nation found that one in seven young adults between the ages of 16-24 is "disconnected" -- meaning neither in school, nor working. "We have too many kids who graduate from high school who are not well-educated, they're not good in reading, they're not good in their numbers and they're not prepared to learn a lot more that a company would want them to learn in order for them to work for that company," says Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.

They point to a 1965 report by then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan which referenced a demographic trend of single parent families as the primary cause. Now about 70 percent of black and 50 percent of Hispanic children are born to single mothers while the single parenthood rate among white families is rising faster than for the other two groups.

"The kids in single-parent families are around five times as likely to be poor as in a married couple family,” says Haskins. "The key thing about the Moynihan report that doesn't get discussed a lot, is the way he said to stop it is to make sure people have jobs. And there's pretty good evidence that in areas where there are more jobs, there are more married couples," says Danziger.

"High-income families have much greater parental inputs, they're better fed, they're better housed, better clothed, they have extracurricular activities, their parents provide them with iPads and educational activities that low income families can't afford," Danziger adds.

"As long as that's the case,"  Haskins opines, "it's going to be very difficult  for any government program to have a substantial reduction in poverty, unless we just give them money, which American voters don't like, and I don't think will happen."

What’s wrong with this picture?

Both of these firmly entrenched government statists are convinced that the American Dream involves money. If only the government would provide more jobs or, failing that, more money to poor people, they reckon, those people would realize the American Dream. They actually think that the American Dream can be furnished through government programs and handouts.

But the American Dream is not about money.

The American Dream is what the American colonists were fighting for during the Revolutionary War. It is what every immigrant has been seeking since that war was won as the reason for coming to America.

The colonists weren’t fighting to force the British government to give them more money. They weren’t fighting to force the king to furnish them with more jobs. 

The waves of new immigrants who turned the United States of America from a backwater nation into a powerhouse of innovation and wealth did not come to these shores with their hands out begging for government provided jobs and financial assistance.

The American dream is about liberty.

The American dream is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

That liberty is gone.

There is only one way to restore the American Dream to all Americans:

The American people must rise up in unison and demand restoration of their liberty!