Barack Obama is a deceiver. Hilary Clinton is a deceiver. So are the whole skulk of politicians and public figures who have steadfastly refused to demand true evidence and convincing argumentation to prove that Obama is even constitutionally eligible for the office he now occupies. So are those who refuse to acknowledge his lifelong commitment to an anti-American communist ideology, which makes a mockery of his twice foresworn oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. So are the “useful idiots” who pretend that his painstaking implementation of the elitist faction’s malign deconstruction of America’s strength is the fruit of well-intentioned incompetence, not well-orchestrated malice. So are the wide-eyed cowards who refuse to notice the design for despotism in the disparate elements of Obama’s constitutionally abusive decisions and actions.

When scanned in light of his lifelong ideological commitment, the clownish comedy of Obama’s occupation of the White House morphs into a fatal tragedy for America’s constitutional republic; an HD mini-series that depicts the systematic overthrow of self-government, of by and for the American people. The motivation evident in every scene is an abiding will to discard the institutions of God-endowed individual, family and constitutional right that are the indispensable foundation of our character, our liberty and our material success.

Now comes the revelation of politically motivated IRS abuses aimed at discouraging and suppressing the organizational efforts of grass-roots political activists determined to defend these institutions. Given the timing of these revelations, it’s not hard to understand people who are suspicious of the elitist faction media’s sudden willingness to spotlight wrongdoing on Obama’s watch. Is it just a ploy intended to distract from the impeachable offenses that may be involved in the cover-up of the truth about the Benghazi assassinations? By engaging their self-defensive passions, is it intended to preoccupy the most vocal grass-roots opponents of the elitist faction’s push for regime change in the United States?

This is certainly worth pondering. But as we do, we should keep in mind that the administrative regime connected with the federal income tax is not just being abused. In the context of fundamental unalienable and constitution rights, it is inherently abusive. Despite the myth of “voluntary compliance,” the implementation of the income tax requires that people surrender the immunity from compulsory self-incrimination established by the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. The income-tax law demands that they answer the question “What was your income last year, from whatever source derived?” They feel compelled by law to answer it, even though their answer may be used as evidence against them. Once their answer is on file, they can be cross-examined as to its veracity, on the assumption that until they prove otherwise, it is incomplete and deceptive. They are guilty until proven innocent, a situation that stands on its head the presumption of innocence necessarily connected with the claim of God-endowed unalienable right America’s system of government is supposed to respect.

Where government exists to secure each individual’s God-endowed unalienable rights, the government can stop an individual from acting (arrest him) only when there is cause to believe that individual is engaged in some wrongful act. Otherwise the government’s action denies and disparages that individual’s unalienable right to liberty, which logically includes the liberty to follow his own conscience. Since, in this respect, each is the judge of his own action, it is logical to presume that the decision to act reflects an affirmative conclusion as to the rightness of the action. Hence, the presumption of innocence.

The government is logically authorized to intervene only when the particular action in question violates the standard of right from which the right to liberty derives, which is a standard based ultimately in an authority (that of the Creator) that takes account of obligations that bind all individuals, together, in the common and reciprocal will for justice that constitutes their society as a whole.

In and of itself, making a living for oneself and one’s family (i.e., doing what is necessary to preserve and perpetuate one’s life and that of the species) is, by the standard of the Creator’s will, inherently right. Given that the aim of government is to secure unalienable rights, unless the government can positively show that an individual’s action or activity in respect of their living violates that standard, the individual’s conscientious exercise of his or her liberty naturally takes precedence over the government’s subsequently derived authority.

Because it overturns the priority of natural right over humanly instituted authority, the administrative regime connected with the federal income tax intrinsically subverts the logic of constitutional self-government in the United States. It represents the institution of a regime in which the will and priorities of those who control the power of government define and determine right, so that any action that resists or contradicts their will not only ceases to enjoy the protection of the law, it becomes a violation which the law aims to discourage, suppress or eliminate.

Simply put, the income tax regime represents the establishment of unconstrained tyranny over the people of the United States. Given the role that Obamacare assigns to the IRS (aided and abetted by Chief Justice Robert’s speciously anti-constitutional assertion that the federal government’s taxing power is not subject to constitutional constraint), the agency can and will become the chief means of enforcing the tyrannical edicts of the corporate socialist dictatorship with which the anti-republican elements of the elitist faction mean to replace America’s representative self-government. The IRS abuses are not just evidence of a threat to the Obama faction’s political opponents. The lies about Benghazi may portend a deployable crisis. Once that crisis has achieved its aim, is the IRS slated to become the compatible mechanism the despots of elitist tyranny will use to routinize the deployment of crisis into the lives of their subjects, everywhere, every day, in every walk of life?

Data: Obama issues orders to allow open homosexuality in the military.

Data: An anti-Christian extremist, who decries Christian military personnel who share their faith as “enemies of the Constitution,” “virulently homophobic” and “human monsters,” meets Obama-appointed Pentagon officials. The Pentagon thereafter issues “a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith.”

Data: U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., says he believes open purchase orders from the Department of Homeland Security to buy over 1 billion rounds of ammunition are part of an “intentional” effort by the Obama administration to “dry up the market” for gun-owning citizens.

Data: Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin believes the federal government is “stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.”

Data: “When the Rhode Island State Senate tallied up the votes against a same-sex marriage bill passed there on Wednesday, something was missing: Republicans. All five of the chambers Republican lawmakers had voted for the bill.” The Rhode Island legislation is part of a general offensive for same-sex marriage in politically vulnerable states around the country. The key to its prospects: support from “some of the country’s leading Republican fundraisers and strategists.” Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has angled for support from wealthy pro-gay marriage contributors like David Koch, flouts his opposition to any change in the BSA policy prohibiting homosexuality in the ranks or the adult leadership of the Scouting movement.

Data: And while, regarding so-called same-sex marriage, the elitist faction leaders and key financiers of the GOP promote the homosexual agenda, against the wishes of the voters the party is supposed to represent, at least one vocal proponent of that agenda admits that “the institution of marriage should not exist. … (F)ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there – because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.”

In regard to political information, we live in times that are cursed with a blessing. Data flow with abundance — found, stored, and researched with relative ease. The bits and pieces are readily available. But the ability to perceive them as more than a series of bits and pieces, to parse, decode and interpret them to make sense of the information they convey, on the whole, is not only rare, it is discouraged and frowned upon.

Consider the different pieces of information provided above. Taken as discrete bits of information, the reports about the possible prosecution of evangelistic Christians in the military and about GOP quislings on the issue of same-sex marriage might be mistaken for separate and discrete episodes. People concerned about the free exercise of religion may be prodded by the first. People concerned about the nature and integrity of family life may be poked by the second. But then we notice that the person attacking Christian evangelizers in the military seeks to label them as “virulently homophobic.” The salience of this attack draws on the moral capital created by the success of the movement to destigmatize homosexuality and demonize those who disapprove of it. The push for same-sex marriage is the cutting edge of that movement. It creates an important component of the moral ammunition being fired off against Christians in the military.

The moral quislings in the GOP are setting the stage for legislative victories that arm the movement promoting homosexuality with the force of law, while leaving the large number of people who oppose this movement without representation (because the political party that is supposed to represent them is more and more openly collaborating with the other side). Will the government’s effort to force people to violate their consciences on this and other issues (like the destruction of nascent human life) meet with opposition? Will armed force be required in this effort? Will it be opposed in kind?

Sarah Palin and Sen. Inhofe both agree in entertaining the possibility that the DHS effort to hoard ammunition is aimed at the America people. Inhofe suggests that it is intended to disarm the people. Palin suggests that it is intended to arm the government. Put the two things together, and you have a situation in which a disarmed people face a government monopoly of arms.

Is the implosion of the money economy the only likely scenario in which that monopoly comes into play? Or does it also have a bearing on the moral economy, i.e., the unconstitutional determination to enforce laws that deny and disparage the Ninth Amendment rights of the natural family, and to impose in their place government fabricated rights? Is the goal to keep order, or to impose a new order in which there is no basis for a claim of right except the arbitrary will of those in positions of power?

What if the government successfully claims the power to disregard claims of unalienable natural right with respect to the human family, the foundational institution of human social life? What will this mean in practice for the whole idea of God-endowed unalienable right, from which America’s institutions of constitutional self-government (of, by and for the people) derive their authority? Contrary to Rousseau’s famous dictum, people are not born free. They are born into the nurturing bonds of family life. If there is no unalienable right to preserve the natural life of the human family, what unalienable rights are left to the human individuals the natural family exists to produce (by natural procreation), nurture and sustain? If family has no meaning or worth but what the government dictates, is there some aspect of the meaning and worth of the natural human individual which government does not determine and control? People who have no natural heritage are apt to have no identity but what the government imposes upon them. In what vain, improbable fantasy of so-called freedom do we imagine as free, individuals with no sense of their own history or personality except what depends on the contrivance and permission of their rulers?

Thus it turns out that the data with which we began are not just separate bits and pieces of information, of concern to this or that special-interest constituency. Seen in relation to one another, they suggest a pattern of activity, a design aimed at subverting, in fact and principle, America’s way of life in decent liberty. Tragically, the so-called “leaders” the elitist faction is presently imposing upon the nation intentionally include none with the strategic competence to understand and articulate that synoptic vision of the whole. Americans who wish to remain free have to look elsewhere. More and more they see the need, but do they have the will?

The current BSA proposal would allow youngsters who practice homosexuality into the organization, but prohibit homosexuals from being adult Scout leaders. For anyone remotely familiar with the Scouting ethos, this should raise an immediate question: how to handle the participation of a homosexual Scout’s household? Parents often take the first steps toward adult leadership in Scouting as the natural result of their support for their child’s participation in the movement. Will self-professed lesbian or homosexual householders be barred from showing their support in the usual way? Will they be prohibited from hosting events, organizing logistical support for Scouting activities and so forth? When their social and organizational skills mark them as effective adult leaders in these activities, will others be forbidden to call on them for help? In grass-roots community activities, people often rise to leadership because they are among the “go-to” people others turn to when they are trying to get things done efficiently. Will officially recognized adult Scout leaders be forbidden to turn to lesbian and/or homosexual householders in this very natural way?

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that this will lead to personally hurtful controversies. Adult Scout leaders who ignore the ban on homosexuals in the leadership ranks will face adverse reaction from parents seeking conscientiously to raise up their children according to tenets of their faith. Adult leaders who try to implement the ban will find themselves accused of personal prejudice and discrimination that shames young Scouts by demeaning the households from which they come. This is a problem already faced by educational institutions such as Catholic schools. Once the inevitable controversies arise, the BSA will come under pressure to drop the ban on adult leaders.

We are in the midst of an historically unprecedented campaign to deny and disparage the rights of the God-endowed natural family. Do the top leaders of the BSA naïvely believe that the emotionally charged, personally confrontational situations their proposal will inevitably foment will not be exploited as part of this campaign? Obviously, the policy being proposed will produce situations the powerful elitist forces pushing for the normalization of homosexuality will portray in the worst possible light.

Ignoring the logic of God-acknowledging moral conscience, they will portray these situations as proof of willfully hurtful personal prejudice and unfair discrimination by the BSA. They will seek to prejudice public opinion in a way that lends credence to civil lawsuits and even criminal prosecution (on civil-rights grounds) against individual BSA leaders and the BSA itself. In addition to the erosion of trust and support from people who have relied on the BSA’s respect for the moral tenets of their faith, the BSA will have to devote financial and personnel resources to defending against these charges. Wrenched between these whirlpools of public reaction, the organization could easily go under.

I frankly think that the forces in the BSA’s top leadership who are promoting the latest proposal fully expect these confrontational situations to develop. They will use them to intimidate and discourage the faithful elements of the BSA’s grass-roots base, until they either withdraw from the movement or surrender to full approval of homosexuality in Scouting, including openly homosexual adult Scout leaders.

The latest proposal from the BSA’s top leaders is a feigned retreat, implemented because the frontal assault on the BSA’s standard for family life met with such strong opposition from the faithful people who make up a solid majority of the BSA’s base. Now, as if on cue, the latest proposal has produced the capitulation of the Mormon Church (foreshadowed during last year’s he Chick-fil-A media frenzy by the position of the Mormon leadership’s political standard bearer, Mitt Romney). Once their strategy is fully implemented, those in the BSA’s top leadership who are acting as agents of the campaign against the natural family will preside over an organization that, in respect of its reputation as a trustworthy source of moral training for young men, will be a hollow façade.

The residual moral appeal of that façade will be used to attract and indoctrinate youngsters in an essentially self-serving, hedonistic and unmanly understanding of human family life, one that destroys the independent moral basis of the family as the primordial, God-ordained institution of human self-government. This will effectively deny the family’s institutional claim to possess God-endowed authority and rights which all other institutions of human government are obliged, by the Creator, to respect.

Thus understood in terms of its likely consequences, the latest proposal for ending the BSA’s ban on homosexual participation in Scouting is a strategic ploy. What is most disturbing is that it uses the young participants in the Scouting movement as cannon fodder in the battle against the natural family. Some youngsters will be positioned to draw other youngsters into situations where, because they react against sexual advances according to the moral precepts of the faith of their fathers, they will be viciously accused of unrighteous bigotry. Or else their vulnerable adolescent emotions will impel them to betray the tenets of conscience derived from their faith, and slip into a whirlpool of compulsive sensual indulgence, moral guilt and spiritual confusion.

In the realm of moral contention, this deployment of, and against, children reminds me of the way the strategists of terror exploit kids in their perpetration of deadly acts of physical violence. I earnestly pray to God to open the eyes of the BSA’s grass-roots leaders and participants. I pray that He will grant them the wisdom to see past false pretenses of compassion and tolerance, in order to recognize a strategy that intentionally and recklessly endangers the moral lives of the youngsters God has entrusted to their care. These young souls deserve better than to be casualties in the battle to force the American people to surrender the unalienable natural rights endowed by their Creator’s provision for the wholesome life of the human family.

– Federalist 26

In response to his mini-filibuster some weeks ago, I omitted to applaud Rand Paul when he demanded that Obama declare explicitly that “noncombatants in America won’t be killed with drone strikes.” I observed at the time that “it’s pathetically easy to conceive of circumstances in which … a decision [involving such casualties], however emotionally and morally difficult, would be required.”

Given the prudential requirements of both law enforcement and national security actions, I wasn’t surprised to read in a CNN story that Sen. Paul has recently disappointed some of the people who applauded his imprudently articulated demand. He “clarified” his position to take better account of reality. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him,” he reportedly said. Of course, he should care, since the policeman’s objective in that situation would properly be to arrest the suspect, not kill him. Thus Paul’s clarification of his drone policy inspires no more confidence than his original pose (and I use the word advisedly.)

Paul’s predicament raises the issue of misplaced confidence I headlined in my blog piece. At the end of the day, government will be no better (and is likely to become much worse) than the people to whom we entrust the use of its powers. Yet Americans keep putting their trust in people whose record simply contradicts such confidence.

Barack Obama is the greatest example of this tragic flaw. Before and since taking office, his statements, actions and results tend to confirm the suspicion that he and the forces he represents are hostile to the prosperity, character and safety of the American people. As I pointed out some years ago:

“On any assumption of goodwill toward America and its institutions, Obama’s policies appear incoherent, disjointed, incompetent and self-destructive. On the assumption of hostility toward America’s vital interests and its way of life, however, they resolve into the rational, coherent and indeed directly linear pursuit of its destruction.”

From Obamacare to amnesty for illegal immigrants, from his indifference to Kermit Gosnell’s morally depraved slaughter of babies to the jihadists’ slaughter of innocents on the streets of Boston, we experience the fact that the implementation of Obama’s life-long anti-American ideology is contributing to the economic and moral collapse of the nation; and that his practiced admiration for America’s adversaries is strengthening their determination to threaten and attack us.

What sense does it make to trust Barack Obama with the safety and well-being of the nation? What sense does it make to trust a medical profession willing to pretend that the murder of babies, or the practice of euthanasia, is consistent with the oath to do no harm (an oath that ought still to be taken seriously, if not by medical professionals then by the people they purport to serve)? What sense does it make to trust GOP politicians, who proclaim their respect for the Constitution but who join with the Democrats to ignore or discard its provisions? Some are doing so with respect to Obama’s eligibility for the office of president, respect for the Second Amendment, the constitutional right of all persons to due process and the unalienable rights of the natural family, which the Constitution’s Ninth amendment forbids them to deny or disparage.

In Federalist 26, when he observed that for government to function “confidence must be placed somewhere,” Hamilton pointed out that “schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution.” With respect to such a scheme he went on to say that it would require “a continued conspiracy for a series of time.” He asked, “Is it probable that it would be persevered in, and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? Is it presumable, that every man, the instant he took his seat in the national Senate or House of Representatives, would commence a traitor to his constituents and to his country?”

When Hamilton posed these questions they were merely a rhetorical device. But in the past decade, despite consistent opposition from the people at large, we have seen the consistent bipartisan advancement of agendas that attack the unalienable right to life, the Ninth Amendment rights of the natural family, the security of our borders, of our sovereignty as a people, and of our property as families and individuals. They also attack our unalienable right to possess the arms required to defend ourselves and our common liberty and the rights of conscience that arise from our obligations to respect “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

America has been and is being betrayed in precisely the improbable way Hamilton suggests, up to and including two-thirds of the congressional representatives elected to the Congress in 2010 on the strength of their commitment to the grass-roots agenda of the tea-party movement, who ended up voting for measures that betrayed their constituents. This betrayal is possible because of the sham two-party system, both wings of which are now controlled by an elitist faction hostile to the perpetuation of America’s constitutional government.

America’s founders foresaw and warned against the mischief of factions that could pervert the necessary delegation of powers toward abuse and injustice. But like the eye that cannot see itself, the founders did not fully appreciate the vital importance of what they themselves contributed to the success of America’s experiment in self-government. They were people of extraordinary talent and accomplishment. But they championed the form of government that respects and encourages the right and capacity of people to be the ultimate arbiters of government’s sovereign power. They placed their confidence in the people – but they made it clear that this was possible only because the American people were such as to put their faith and confidence in God, who is the Creator and will be the judge of all.

The American republic is now threatened, and may already be lost. The elitist faction has, for the last quarter century, purposely implemented an agenda aimed at undermining and demoralizing those who still live by the words, “In God We Trust.” The only path that might lead to its restoration is a political movement based explicitly on proclaiming, and acting on, not just those words, but the logic of liberty and justice they represent. Are you interested in exploring that logic? That is the purpose of everything I have written for several years at Loyal to Liberty. It may be worth exploring, starting with the articles grouped under the heading “Christian Federalist” in the navigation bar.

When he was a state senator in the Illinois Legislature, Barack Obama opposed a bill intended to assure that nascent children who managed to survive an abortionist’s effort to murder them would be given the same care as other children born alive into this world. As a result of his statements and actions at that time, I and others have accurately noted that he countenanced infanticide rather than concede one jot or tittle of his fanatical support for so-called “abortion rights.” As reported by factcheck.org (a site not notorious for its willingness to clarify facts detrimental to Obama), “His stated reasons for opposing ‘born-alive’ bills have to do with preserving abortion rights, a position he is known to support and has never hidden.”

However, as the bill approached a vote in the legislature in 2002, Obama slyly avoided explaining his position in such stark ideological terms. He posed as an advocate for the concerns of the medical community, suggesting that the bill cast doubt on the professionalism of the “doctor” carrying out the death sentence the mother had imposed upon her offspring. Obama said:

“Essentially, I think … the only plausible rationale, to my mind, for this legislation would be if you had a suspicion that a doctor, the attending physician, who has made an assessment that this is a nonviable fetus and that, let’s say for the purposes of the mother’s health … labor is being induced, that that physician a) is going to make the wrong assessment, and b) if the physician discovered, after the labor had been induced, that, in fact, he made an error, or she made an error, and, in fact that this was not a nonviable fetus but, in fact, a live child, that that physician, of his own accord or her own accord, would not try to exercise the sort of medical measures and practices that would be involved in saving that child. Now … if you think that there are possibilities that doctors would not do that, then maybe this bill makes sense. … I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure that they’re looked after.”

Obama voiced this confidence despite the fact that he was among the legislators who, in March of the previous year, heard first hand testimony from Jill Stanek, a delivery ward RN in an Illinois hospital. Stanek’s description of infants “allowed to die without any attempt to provide medical treatment” even moved most of Obama’s pro-abortion Democrat colleagues in the Illinois Legislature to support legislation to protect the lives of every infant born alive in Illinois hospitals. Unlike them, his commitment to the specious right to murder one’s posterity is so fanatical that he would rather risk fully exposing the murderous intent and nature of so-called “abortion rights” than to limit their scope in any way.

More amazing, however, than Obama’s obdurate insistence upon the death penalty for infants who survive the “medical care” of the doctor appointed to assassinate them is his indifference to the gruesome realities being exposed, in chilling detail, at the trial of abortionist “Dr.” Kermit Gosnell. The accounts of casual child murders at Gosnell’s death house for nascent babies, complete with nauseating humor, ought certainly to do what Jill Stanek’s moving testimony could not, those many years ago. They ought to break Obama’s heart of stone.

Instead, his official spokesman persists in dismissing as “hypothetical” the now evident fact that the practice of so-called “abortion rights” simply means licensing physicians to murder helpless, innocent babies. This practice contradicts and ultimately displaces the heart for healing that, once upon a time, lived by the sacred maxim, Primum non nocere, “First, do no harm.” True physicians were not permitted to be the instrument of action that has no intent but willful, death dealing harm. Gosnell represents what has become of medical professionals since that primordial discipline was cast to the wind. This exposes Obama for what he is, (and along with him, all those who promote the suppression of the unalienable right to life), a “most secret man of blood.”

Thanks to Kermit Gosnell, the secret is out. In recent weeks, others have written extensively about the elitist faction media’s conspiracy of silence regarding the Gosnell trial. Nothing more emphatically proves the consciousness of guilt that haunts and oppresses those who have conspired to impose the culture of murderous death, so contrary to the founding premises of our society, which include, first of all, respect for the unalienable, God-endowed right to life. If they thought the homicidal atmosphere at Gosnell’s death house was exceptional, the elitist media commissars would not feel compelled to shield the facts from general public scrutiny. They apparently feel certain that the facts of the Gosnell case are like roaches caught in the light, each one representing so many more still hidden in places of darkness.

They know, and are part of, the noisome fog of murderous intent that pervades the whole abortion industry. And tragically, through the fissure opened up by the wicked notion that wholesale child murder is a rightful aspect of “medical care,” this deadly fog of evil begins to pervade the entire medical profession. At the beginning and the end of life, those who should only be healers are being perverted into skilled assassins. Having licensed individuals to procure the murder of their offspring, the elitists who now control government power are fashioning “health care” institutions to give themselves license to cull the human herd, without regard for any will or judgment but their own.

The facts being revealed at Gosnell’s trial are like the auguries, mentioned in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” They cry out for judgment against the spilling of innocent blood. You see, Shakespeare’s Macbeth was right. God’s first law of human natural justice (Genesis, 9:6) means that blood will have blood. We Americans may not wish to admit it, but somewhere in the midst of our grief and dismay in the aftermath of an attack like the one that just now marred the Boston Marathon, the still, small voice of conscience whispers: “The evil that we fight is but the shadow of the evil that we do.” Such shadow-boxing is part of the choreography of God’s due process. It is a self-defeating martial art, at which Obama is presently the sensei-in-chief. He represents an elitist faction skilled at producing blows they then purport to parry. As long as the American people continue to suffer, in positions of power, such minions of elitist factional ambition, we will fight in vain against the ruthless forces that are gradually consuming our nation’s life in decent liberty.

For the past several years I’ve been writing about the fact that the push for gay marriage isn’t just about rights for homosexuals. It’s about discarding the understanding of God-endowed unalienable rights that is the basis for constitutional self-government in the United States. I’ve also traced the logic that makes it clear that the campaign to deny and disparage the God-endowed rights of the natural family strikes at the root of private property rights as a whole.

The idea of private property is an extension of what at first appears to be self-evident fact – that our bodies belong, respectively, to each one of us. All other things being equal, if we pick fruit off a tree, it is for us to eat it, or otherwise dispose of it as we see fit. If we gather the makings of a lean-to or hut and construct it with our own hands, it is for us to take shelter in, or share with others as we see fit. And so forth.

The problem is that, starting with the body itself, all things are not equal. That fact is clear from the moment we’re born. Human infants cannot survive on their own. Someone else has to use her body to provide food, procure warmth and otherwise assure the comfort and survival of the infant’s body. In fact, except for the physical exertions of others (the exertions involved in the act of procreation, the labor involved in child-bearing and birth) the child would have no body at all.

In the natural course of things, the primordial human belonging appears in the relationship between parents and children, and in particular the physical relationship between mother and child. On appearing in the world, the helpless, utterly dependent child appears to belong especially to the mother, by token of her all-encompassing physical possession of the child’s body, which exists and develops as an integral part of her own.

But doesn’t the material from which the body is made have something to do with the nature of its belonging? If I gather wood for a hut and build it myself, it belongs to me. But if I build the hut with wood another has gathered or helped to gather, doesn’t the result also belong to my helpmate? Or if all the material is provided by another, along with the plan for the hut’s construction, and the guidance needed to carry it out, doesn’t the hut also belong to the one who acts as architect, producer and engineer?

In similar fashion, all those who take part in the activity that produces the child are in their different ways responsible for the result. The parents are jointly the agents of that responsibility, the ones who must, according to the nature of things, assume particular responsibility for the child’s existence. But their action derives from and depends upon materials and information provided by another, whose knowledge and prior disposition of things determines the actions entailed by the responsibility they assume.

Translated into the language of unalienable rights that articulates the principles of America’s public and political life, the materials and information required for the child’s existence are the organic matter the human body is composed of. The knowledge and prior disposition of things are the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” which constitute the programming that governs the activities of that organic matter. When parents assume the responsibility to take the actions necessary for the child’s survival, in accordance with the human body’s programming (which is also that of their own bodies), they do what is right for the child and for the perpetuation of the human species.

By this exercise of right, they accept the natural belonging their child represents, which appears and forever remains a belonging that owns up to their responsibility for the child’s well-being. It is the answer they give to the one who is ultimately the Creator and sovereign of all that is, including the child and themselves. It is the righteous consent which justifies their share in the Creator’s sovereign authority with respect to the child’s welfare.

The idea that our children belong to us is, therefore, not “a kind of private idea.” It is the logical consequence of the idea of God-endowed right on which the civil society, Constitution and politics of the United States was founded. It is the recognition of the natural right derived from a parent’s fulfillment of his or her responsibility to God for the child’s life and well-being. It is the root of the claim of natural belonging, antecedent to the existence of any and all humanly instituted government authorities that is the primordial paradigm of the belongings every human being may properly claim for his own.

Melissa Harris-Perry obviously rejects the logic of unalienable right as it applies to the natural family. But if the relationship of mutual belonging that God’s natural law establishes between parents and children is not an unalienable property of our human nature, what is? Is property right simply a function of power, such that the world and all those in it belong to whomever has the power to seize and hold on to them? If whole communities can run roughshod over the self-evident natural rights of a child’s parents, what belongings does justice secure from the depredations of those in power? Once every mother’s son is raised to believe that he belongs to no one in particular, what will be the existential basis for individual identity, individual aspiration, individual achievement and responsibility?

For those of us who understanding the true implications of the push for homosexual marriage rights, Harris-Perry’s collectivist drivel is, as the saying goes, the sound of the other shoe dropping. Once government fiat has been substituted for God-endowed right as the basis for the institution of family, the next step is the implementation of the view Harris-Perry articulates, that from birth individuals belong to the state. People who don’t own themselves obviously can’t own anything else – which erases the basis for private property rights.

Have you thought this through? If not, a good place to start is the most recent article on my blog. It links to another article that goes more deeply into these matters, and so forth. It’s time for people determined to preserve our economic liberty and prosperity to realize that the campaign to deny and disparage the natural rights of family simply sets the stage for communism, and the end of all economic freedom.

Is it the speed-reading craze or the general degradation of instruction, particularly in the public schools, that allows supposedly intelligent people to get away with nonsense like this? I mention speed-reading because it trains people to read words without taking the time to analyze the logic of what’s being said.

What sense does it make to say that the term “illegal immigrant” “dehumanizes those it describes? The word illegal means “unlawful, against or not according to law.” The term “immigrant” means “one who is immigrating,” i.e., in the process, state or condition of moving to or settling in a new place, region or country. The term “dehumanize” means to take away that which makes someone human. If I say that someone is in the process, state or condition of moving to or settling in a new place unlawfully, what essential attribute of humanity do I deny or take away?

Does pointing out that someone is new to a given place, region or country deny his humanity? Does pointing out that people are there unlawfully deny their humanity? In explaining the objection to the phrase “illegal immigrant,” Daniel Morcate (chief newsroom editor at Univision) is quoted as saying, “We can call various acts or actions illegal, but not the people who commit them.” But the word “immigrant” describes a person in terms of the action or activity in which they are involved. Conflating people with the action in which they are engaged is a commonplace and sometimes essential way of describing them.

So if I see people entered in a race, I can say “look at those entries,” describing the people in terms of their active status or condition. Under the same conditions a horse or a dog may be described in the same way. Being entered in a race is not a distinctively human status. But this does not mean that, by describing people as “entrants” I dehumanize them. If I find out that some of them are not qualified to participate (they failed a required drug test, for example), I might describe them as “illegal entrants.” The word “entry” conflates the person with their status in respect of the race. The term illegal accurately applies, in this regard, to the composite object of perception the word “entry” evokes.

This way of speaking is taken for granted in every realm of human endeavor. Accountants are certified or uncertified. Doctors are qualified or unqualified to perform surgery. The notion that people cannot be described as “illegal” (meaning that their status or condition is unlawful on account of the activity in which they are engaged) would mean that we live in a world in which there is trespassing, but no trespassers; robbery but no robbers; murder but no murderers, and so forth. All the latter terms describe people as essentially illegal, and the first (trespassers) is conceptually identical to the term “illegal immigrant.” Must we remove them all from the lexicon of acceptable speech?

Morcate’s notion that calling people illegal somehow dehumanizes them is not just contrary to common and acceptable usage, however. It is logically incoherent. To err is human, as the old saying goes. One aspect of what makes us human is our capacity to act in ways that go against the rules, even the rules that prescribe the necessities of our nature. Unlike ants and bees, we can reject our natural programming. In this respect, we are tragically never more decidedly human than when we are breaking the law, defying the rules, going against the conventional wisdom, etc. In this respect, far from denying their humanity, describing a person as an “illegal” ironically confirms it.

Of course, when we ascribe illegality to a person, we do so in a sense that may go beyond what we mean when we call non-human objects “illegal.” The non-human object is incidentally illegal, because its status in that regard arises from purely external factors. Because we can hold people responsible for their actions and activities, a person’s illegality may be the result of self-conscious self-determination, i.e., his own choice. If we simply disregard this possibility, if we treat people as if the illegality of their action, status or condition implies no responsibility on their part, then we deny one of the essential attributes of humanity. We dehumanize them.

So Morcate and the other immigration thought police are guilty as charged of the very crime they accuse others of committing. This conviction is a characteristic of the mavens of political correctness, owing to the dehumanizing character of the ideology that drives their agenda. They feign outrage at supposedly “dehumanizing” terms which characterize people as “illegal” on account of the illegal activities in which they are engaged, even though lawbreaking is a distinctively human capacity. But they themselves happily describe people as “homosexual” on the grounds that they have a penchant for certain kinds of physical pleasure that constitutes an imperative so inalterable that, like the non-human animals, they cannot choose to be otherwise than they are. The distinctively human capacity for choice has no bearing upon it.

This view of homosexuality quite literally “dehumanizes” people by denying one of their distinctively human capacities. Refusing to use terminology that implies that immigrants may be responsible for their legal or illegal status dehumanizes people. Treating nascent humans in the womb as “a mass of tissue” that can be killed without imputation of murder dehumanizes people. Regarding human beings as the products of mindless random changes in some primordial ooze dehumanizes people. It begins to look as if the whole thrust of the ideology that underlies “political correctness” is to dehumanize people, so that they can be treated as helpless, irresponsible victims of circumstance; or else abused as material objects whose title of humanity gives them no intrinsic worth.

And yet some people pretend to see no reason to connect this way of thinking with totalitarian oppression and mass murder.

A constitution … must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two that which has the superior obligation and validity ought of course to be preferred to the statute …

Nor does this conclusion by any means suppose a superiority of the judicial to the legislative power. It only supposes that the power of the people is superior to both; and that where the will of the legislature, declared in its statutes, stands in opposition to that of the people, declared in the Constitution, the judges ought … to regulate their decisions by the fundamental laws … (Federalist #78)

These days the cacophony of opinionated drivel that passes for serious discussion of constitutional issues drives me again and again to recur in my thinking to the writings of the original advocates of the U.S. Constitution. A sturdy thread of reasoning runs through and clarifies their argumentation. Because of their careful reasoning, the writings of the original Federalists exemplify a logic that can be extended, through changing times, to take account of various circumstances.

For example, the reasoning in Federalist #78 that justifies what we now call “judicial review” may logically be applied to the other branches of government because their powers are wielded by officials who are, like the justices of the Supreme Court, bound by their oath of office to abide by the Constitution. In their responsibility for separate and equal branches of government, these officials have a separate and equal obligation to act on a conscientious decision about whether their actions are consistent with their sworn duty.

Like the justices of the Supreme Court, therefore, the president of the United States must compare every act of Congress and every judicial judgment with what the Constitution requires. And, if he sees “an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, or course to be preferred …” Logic forbids the notion that the view of the Constitution taken by one branch automatically commands obedience from the others. For if it did, they would not be separate and equal. Each has an independent obligation to make sure that the power for which it is chiefly responsible is used in a way that accords with the supreme law provided for in the Constitution.

Now, proponents of the Defense of Marriage law insist that the present occupant of the White House must simply “obey the law,” even if he has reached the conclusion that it violates a constitutional right he is obliged by oath to respect. But their insistence violates the logic that substantiates the Constitution’s constraining effect on the use of the U.S. government’s powers. In the first instance, each branch has the duty to keep within the boundaries of the Constitution. The issue involved in Obama’s refusal to defend DOMA is not, therefore, necessarily about his obligation to “obey the law.” It is about whether or not, in this particular instance, his view that the law is unconstitutional is correct.

Contrary to the self-aggrandizing assertions of the lawyers’ guild and its camp followers, the judicial branch cannot logically assert that it has the constitutional power simply to command the other branches. In any given case, the judges and justices are obliged to follow the Constitution in the exercise of their own power. But apart from the opinion they express in that particular case, “the judiciary … has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aide of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

Obviously disputes will arise among the different branches as to the constitutionality of some judgment made, or action taken, by one or another of them. Of the three, however, only the legislative branch is provided with the power needed to initiate an attempt to alter the composition of the others. To be sure, that power is hedged about in various ways to assure against hasty and ill-conceived results that would fatally affect the stable operation of the government. Taken all in all, these hedges force constitutional issues down a path that may ultimately lead to an electoral scrutiny by the people, in whose voice and name the Constitution is written.

Because the elitist faction aims to overthrow constitutional government of, by and for the people, they work to obscure or tacitly deny this fact. They want Americans to accept the notion that those who happen to wield the power of government at any given moment may decide, amongst themselves and without recourse to the people, what is constitutional and what is not. If and when the American people foolishly acquiesce in this oligarchic lie, they will thereby surrender their status as a free people.

But does this mean that a constitutionally sufficient majority of the people have the right to impose their will, however patently unjust, on some or all the rest of the society? As the careful wording of Federalist #78 quietly indicates (when discussing the judges who are supposed to act as agents of the people), the people have the superior power but “they ought to regulate their decision by the fundamental laws …”

Having referred to the Constitution itself as “a fundamental law,” why does the argument at this point allude to “the fundamental laws”? Well, in the first place, the Constitution says, “This Constitution, and all the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land,” thus conferring constitutional status on a plurality of laws and treaties. But beyond this, the Constitution refers, in the Ninth Amendment, to the fact that “the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

As I recently pointed out, we learn the source and nature of these unenumerated rights from another “fundamental law” of the United States – the Declaration of Independence, which ascribes them to the Creator’s endowment of all humanity. Most self-evident among them are the rights of the God-endowed natural family “rooted in obligations antecedent to any and all humanly instituted law or government.” From this endowment the people of the United States derive the sovereign authority to establish and maintain their self-government. Unless they are willing to subvert their own sovereignty, they are obliged, in their actions and decisions, to respect the source of authority that validates it.

In the weeks to come, the U.S. Supreme Court may decide to promote specious rights intended to supplant “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” invoked in the Declaration of Independence. They may decide, in contravention of the Ninth Amendment, to deny and disparage the natural rights of the God endowed family. It will then be for us, the people, to decide how to respond to their assault on the very root and source of our claim to decent liberty. If we respect the logic that reasonably, morally and constitutionally justifies what their decision seeks to destroy, we will be able confidently to appeal, as America’s founders did in the Declaration, “to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” Then, whatever we face, we will have the courage to defend the institution that God made to be the living archetype of all the rest of our belongings.

“Former Attorney General Edwin Meese told CPAC 2013 attendees that the best approach for the country’s future is one that emphasizes returning to the original principles that built America, as opposed to the more powerful centralized government favored by President Barack Obama. ‘It’s the responsibility of conservatives to go back to those principles and get away from the all-powerful state that the current administration wants,’ Meese said.”

As a matter of historical fact, the people who drafted the original Constitution of the United States and went on to lead the campaign to secure its ratification aimed, for very practical reasons, to establish a more coherent and powerful national government than was possible under the Articles of Confederation. They sincerely believed in libertarian self-government. But for that very reason they did not lie to themselves about its defects. Those defects were clear to them, not only from the history of other times and places, but from their own experience, so fresh that it was the reason for their convention.

Though deeply and habitually attached to liberty, they had the intellectual and moral integrity to acknowledge that great care is needed to preserve the distinction between liberty and licentiousness; and between the love of liberty and arrogant disdain for just authority and law. They were profoundly aware of the fact that such care was especially important in order to conserve government based on the consent of the governed, in which the people are empowered to be the arbiters of access to government power. Deciding what to do as individuals they determine, as a whole, what the government will be like.

The Constitution the founders produced was intended to lead the nation toward a more powerful central government, not away from it. Is Attorney General Meese simply mistaken when he says that the nation’s founding principles have a different aim? He is not mistaken; but his statement only makes sense when we remember that, though the U.S. Constitution was framed in light of America’s founding principles, it is not the document from which we learn what they are. That document is the American Declaration of Independence. It must be, for that very reason, included among the Organic Laws of the United States.

The Declaration provides the basis for understanding the true origin, aim and end of constitutional self-government. In this respect it deals first with the origin or principle that defines human nature. From this it derives the aim and end of the governments instituted by those who share that nature. Human nature is the work of the Creator, who is determined to preserve and sustain humanity. On account of this determination it is incumbent upon each human individual, insofar as we are able, to preserve humanity in ourselves and as a whole.

People who accept this obligation consent to do what is right, according to our God-endowed nature. God-endowed unalienable rights arise from this decision. They are, therefore, in the first place, rooted not so much in our freedom as in our right exercise of freedom, our willingness to implement the “provision God makes for our existence as human beings.” Yet “because this exercise implements God’s will for our nature, all creatures capable of consciously or self-consciously responding to His will are prohibited from denying or disparaging our action. In respect of our righteous action, they are obliged to leave us alone, to let us act freely.”

Thus, as a logical consequence of the principles of the Declaration, every valid claim of right is associated with the freedom to exercise the right. But in light of those same principles, not every exercise of freedom entails a valid claim of right. This is the essential point forgotten or willfully rejected by many so-called libertarians these days. As a result, they advocate positions that ignore what America’s founders were determined to respect, to wit, the distinction between liberty and licentiousness; and between the wholesome courage wherewith we stand upon our rights and the rebellious arrogance that disdains decent self-government.

As I point out in the essay on Ninth Amendment rights quoted above, the Declaration’s logic in this respect allows Americans to recognize and properly assert rights not mentioned in the Constitution. The 9th Amendment exists to provide them with clear constitutional grounds upon which to stand as they invoke these rights, as constraints upon government power.

At the moment, the relevance of this constitutional claim is painfully obvious. The elitist faction forces presently controlling the U.S. government and some state governments (including Republicans as well as Democrats) are moving to deny the constitutional right of individuals or states to oppose the taking of human life, as required by the first law of “nature and Nature’s God.” They are doing so in the context of an insidious, persistent assault on Second Amendment rights. They are also doing so in the context of Obamacare, as they prepare, by force of unconstitutional edicts and “laws,” to deny the constitutional right of individuals and States to refuse complicity in so-called health-care practices that disregard this same life-preserving natural law obligation. In addition, by promoting so-called homosexual rights, they are engaged in a general offensive to disparage, subvert and ultimately deny the constitutional rights – rooted in obligations antecedent to any and all humanly instituted law or government – that are inherent in the God-endowed family, the primordial institution that is the paradigm, in terms both of liberty and obligation, for natural justice and human community.

The Constitution’s Ninth Amendment provides the key to recognizing and justifying legal and other moves to oppose what amounts, on every front, to a wholesale assault on the first principle of constitutional self-government in the United States, i.e., the Declaration’s affirmation of God-endowed individual rights. Next week I plan to post an article at my blog in which I will discuss specific instances in which politicians and other public figures, who claim to be conservatives, are cooperating with this assault. By discussing these examples, I hope to awaken Americans committed to our founding principles, and to the constitutional republic based upon them, to a simple fact: No one prominently associated with, or promoted by, either of the so-called major parties appears to shares this commitment. Unless Americans who do share it rouse themselves and unite against the regressive elitist faction agenda, the incomparably successful American experiment in principled self-government will give way, first to disorder and dissolution and then, in all likelihood, to the most thoroughly totalitarian elitist despotism humankind has ever known.

This is how the folks at NASA begin their discussion of the science involved in the search for solar systems other than our own. Apparently, they think that when we observe effects that correspond to what our experience leads us to expect from the activity of a certain cause, it is rational to infer that a similar cause is producing the effects we observe, even when we cannot yet confirm that fact by more direct observation.

Though as individuals human beings have proven more ornery than most other natural objects, on the whole and over time human experience has confirmed that certain motives (love, hate, greed, jealousy pride, the instinct for survival) consistently produce certain effects. The operation of the criminal justice system in most societies very largely depends on investigations and verdicts based on inferences draw on this experience, even when no one was actually present to witness the criminal act under scrutiny. As in the search for distant planets, so in the search for justice such inferences are considered sane and reasonable.

In the American Declaration of Independence America’s founders specifically allude to the critical role this type of thinking must have in securing the liberty of a free people. Speaking of the evils associated with unjust government, they conclude that “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. …” Of particular importance in their statement of this conclusion is the reference to a “design,” which suggests a plan intelligently conceived and carried out in order to achieve a given effect, in this case the subjugation of the people “under absolute despotism.”

A number of individuals are required to carry out such a plan, individuals who wittingly or unwittingly cooperate to achieve the goal. Because their actions are the visible manifestation of an otherwise invisible coordination, their activities may aptly be characterized as a “conspiracy,” a word that suggests that they are analogous to things, like breath or wind, imperceptible until we apply the right faculty of perception. Thus people unwilling or unable rationally to think through the information they obtain from sense perception are unlikely to recognize a conspiracy until they feel its effects, and in many cases not even then. In this respect their condition appears to be like that of animals with little or no self-conscious intellect, which makes them susceptible to traps designed to take advantage of their lack of foresight.

It is a sign of the times that what I call the elitist faction media, in all its aspects (news, education, entertainment), has for several decades now taken pains to make the word “conspiracy” into a byword for irrational or insane thinking. In fact what is irrational is to assert that it is insane to apply to human affairs a way of thinking routinely accepted as sane and necessary in the physical sciences, especially given the fact that human beings appear to be far more capable of deliberate deception than stones or fig trees. It’s as if a salesperson should adamantly insist that it’s insane to apply to the ingredients used in her product the same measures routinely employed to verify the presence of, let’s say, mercury or lead in other products. Our common sense would respond, like the queen in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: “Methinks this lady doth protest too much.”

Evident and proliferating signs of a design for despotism now litter the political landscape of our country. Even if America’s founders had not warned Americans to guard against it, the effort being made to discourage us from seeing these signs for what they are ought to make us suspicious. Over the past several years, I have done my best to rouse this suspicion. I have especially encouraged conservatives to think through the consistent pattern of actions and results the GOP has produced for the past 25 years or so. During most of my lifetime the Democrats have been so openly committed to despotic government that anyone who claims to value liberty, and yet still supports them, deserves only pity or contempt. But in its platform, and in the rhetoric of many of its political figures, the GOP professes to oppose the ruinous socialist despotism Democrats have inflicted upon some of our major urban areas and which they now seek to impose upon the nation.

At some point, though, it makes no sense for people who have trusted the GOP to go on acting as if results that contradict the beliefs and convictions stated in the party’s platform come from incompetence, bad messaging, media bias and so forth. Trusting an institution that has repeatedly failed you is, beyond a certain point, so irrational that it becomes suspect. Yet all too many GOP apologists and pundits adamantly refuse to consider the explanation that directly conforms with the lessons of human experience, to wit: that a consistent pattern of lies and betrayals is evidence of a systematic effort to deceive and betray.

Most politically conservative Americans profess respect for America’s founders. They seek to preserve, protect and defend the constitutional republic the founders worked to establish. They claim to uphold the principles of God-endowed right and representative government proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence. Yet altogether too many of them refuse to respect and apply the “conspiracy thinking” the founders counted on to assure that Americans would recognize and react against the design for despotism. Why is this so? I attempt to answer that question in my latest blog posting, entitled “The spiritual import of conspiracy thinking.”