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You want theocracy, America? |
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The constitution party of Oregon has this to say for itself and its members:
Quote: Dear Voter, The Constitution Party of Oregon asks you to join us in honoring God, defending the family, and seeking to restore our Republic. (Our candidates take the oath of office to support the Constitution seriously. They also take the Bible on which they place their hand seriously; they are God-fearing individuals.) We are not a sectarian religious political party. We merely accept the self-evident concept that our rights come from our Creator, not from our government. Our nominees pledge to uncompromisingly work for the implementation of the following seven principles: Not sectarian? Really? Yet you simultaneously claim that the Bible (which is a collection of specifically Christian allegorical texts) is true and infallible.
Quote: Life: We believe in Divine Providence and recognize our Creator as the author of human life. Thus we believe in the absolute sanctity of human life. The first duty of civil government is the protection of innocent human life from conception until natural death, no exceptions. When government sanctions abortion, then all live [sic] are at risk. Which raises some questions:
1) If the sanctity of life is absolute, what about wars, especially wars of aggression? Or is the sanctity of life only applicable to other “believers”?
2) The phrase “from conception” is an inherently religious one, so how does this jive with the first amendment separation of church and state?
3) If a government sanctions and engages in endless war, does that not place the lives of family, community, country, and the world at far greater risk than whether or not abortion is legal within its borders?
4) Following from question three, if abortion is illegal, does it really make sense for family and communal cohesion to force impoverished people to bear children they can not afford to raise, thereby increasing the crime rate as those youths resort to crime in order to survive and support their own families?
Quote: Liberty: Far from granting license to 'do whatever we want', true liberty comes from God and real freedom is born of self-government. With James Madison, we assert the precious American ideal which set our country apart from other nations... "we have staked the whole future of American Civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the whole future ... upon the capacity of each of us to govern ourselves, according to the ten commandments of God." And here we have a wonderful instance of selective quotation. Madison's full quote is this:
“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
That doesn't accord with the desired interpretation, does it? In fact, this misrepresentation goes so far as to be historical revisionism, as Madison was one of the principal writers and endorsers of the Constitution, wrote the entirety of the original Bill of Rights, most of the Federalist Papers (which laid out the case for ratification of the Constitution by the states), and was notably secular during his entire political career.
When Madison spoke of self-government, he was not doing so in a religious sense, but in the sense that the people are capable of deciding for themselves how they want their government to run. Religion, for Madison and most of the others who wrote the Constitution and fought for its ratification, was a strictly personal affair that should not be applied to politics, law, and the governance of a country, which is specifically why the very first clause of the first amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” The supreme court has ruled repeatedly that this clause is meant to separate church power from state power and vice versa. To claim otherwise is to either be willfully ignorant of the history and law of the country you claim to support or to be engaging in actively destroying that government and the principles upon which it was founded.
Quote: Family: Our Creator set in place the family as the first divinely instituted form of Government. It is the duty of civil government to recognize and protect the authority of the family unit. When the state usurps the family's authority, the hearts of the children are turned to the state, rather than to the fathers. Such socialist actions deny the created order and harm our communities. First off, where are we getting this claim that the state is usurping the autonomy of the family?
Certainly, there are laws in place that are designed to take children from families that abuse them and put them somewhere better, and there are laws in place to protect individuals from abusive spouses or abusive boyfriends/girlfriends, and so on, but these laws are designed and intended to strengthen the community by removing violence and abuse from the lives of those who live there. This is a very far cry from nationalistic indoctrination in which the state comes before family and community.
As for the socialism claim, when a state is intent on indoctrination, there are no historical precedents to point to in which a socialist approach to governance engages in indoctrination. It is always authoritarian, most often fascist, states that engage in indoctrination. Socialism is about providing for everyone in the community (which happens to be one of the core principles of Christianity), whereas indoctrination sacrifices community in favor of state (or church) power.
Quote: Property: We believe that the right of individuals to own and steward their property is God-given; established in such commandments as "Thou shalt not steal." and "Thou shalt not covet." We encourage private generosity, but oppose the forced transfer of one's wealth to others by the state. We believe that the loss of 'external' property rights leads to the loss of 'internal' rights of personal conscience. It was James Madison who said, "Conscience is the most sacred of all property." “We believe” is the operative phrase here, which causes further confusion with an apparently intentional misunderstanding of two of the most well known of the biblical commandments. If we're going with a strictly biblical approach to property, then women and children would be property, we would still have slavery as an acceptable form of labor, and slaughtering an entire people and then commandeering their property would be just fine.
Contrary to the assertions made here, there is actually evidence to support the claim that when a government redistributes wealth from those who have more than they need to those who have little or nothing, the social fabric and community as a whole benefits and becomes stronger and more stable. Crime decreases as those who would otherwise be subjected to permanent poverty are provided the means of moving out of poverty, which benefits everyone.
And James Madison? He's being taken out of context again as a means to lend credence to a socially bankrupting belief system.
Quote: The U.S. Constitution: In these United States, the Constitution established a representative federal republic - which represents the sovereignty of the people under God over the state. Our founders purposed that the Constitution would uphold those ideals expressed in our Declaration of Independence, as the law of the land, and limit the power and scope of the federal government. Actually, this is mostly correct. The flaw here is “under God”, since the US was founded strictly as a secular form of government. There has always been push back from the religious right to this entire concept of secular government because it means they're less able to exert social control through the power of government. The main fall back for claims that the US was founded as a religious country lies in the fact that “In God we trust” is printed on the currency, but this saying did not appear until after the civil war, and it did not become the official motto of the country until 1956, almost two centuries after the ratification of the constitution and bill of rights.
There are also claims that a vast majority of the justifications and bases for the constitution and bill of rights are biblical in origin, but this also is not true. A vast majority of the constitution is based on Enlightenment thinking, and while sermons and speeches that are religious in nature were referenced in support of ratification or in writing some parts of both the constitution and the bill of rights, almost none of the content and arguments for ratification were based on or taken from the Bible.
Quote: Limited, Local Government: Our desire is to return the federal government to its constitutional boundaries. The 10th amendment in our Bill of Rights strictly limits the federal government to those jurisdictions specifically stated within the Constitution. As a principle, our founders sought to ensure the duties of civil government always be performed at the lowest possible level. Local elected officials and clerks are more directly accountable to the people. Again, this is mostly accurate (Two for eight so far! On a roll!), but leaves out two important facts:
1) The amendment process, by which local government can further constrain the federal government, and
2) The 10th amendment reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” which means there is nothing in either the constitution itself or the various amendments that prohibits the federal government from taking on additional powers and jurisdiction that fall specifically within its purview.
Ultimately, except for purposes of law enforcement involving federal law and regulation or military purposes, the federal government has no jurisdiction to encroach on the rights of the states to self-governance. Of course, there are plenty of examples that can be pointed to in which the federal government appears to do just that, most recently with the passage of health care reform, but since the federal government is the arbiter of national economic policy, and health care costs and abuses are a nation wide issue, the federal government was entirely within its jurisdiction to impose national restrictions. The states are still free to regulate (or not) the health care providers and insurers within their own borders, but they have no jurisdiction on setting national policy.
Quote: American Sovereignty: We are firmly committed to the protection of our borders, our trade and our common defense. We believe that America is to be the friend of liberty everywhere, but the guarantor and provisioner of ours alone. We oppose membership in the United Nations and any other treaty or affiliation that attempts to assert authority over our Constitution or bypass our sovereign citizens' constitutionally elected representatives. 1) The United States created the United Nations in the aftermath of WWII.
2) The constitution specifically states that any treaty ratified by congress is the law of the land. If that treaty violated national sovereignty, it would not be ratified and would therefore be unenforcable.
However, what does bypass the citizens' right to self-governance is special interest groups, who essentially buy influence through campaign contributions. This problem has been further exacerbated by the Citizens United vs FEC ruling made by the supreme court several months ago, which equated the spending of money as a free speech right. This effectively legalized the buying of politicians at all levels of government. This problem is complicated further still by the fact that business groups, lobby groups, and special interests (primarily business related) very often write the laws that end up getting passed by congress because the politicians are so busy earning money for their next campaign that they have little to no time to do their actual job.
Quote: If you don't like being taxed to police the world while our own borders are unprotected, losing our jobs to other nations because of environmentalist nonsense and government regulations, having our rights trampled and your property confiscated, or being exposed to God's wrath on our nation because it condones the shedding of innocent blood and rampant moral perversion, vote for your Constitution Party candidates. In order:
1) Being taxed to police the world isn't accurate. The US national debt is so large that it's running almost everything on credit now. The taxes it collects are barely sufficient to pay the interest on the money it owes.
2) The US border with Mexico is one of the most heavily patrolled in the world, and its border with Canada is going the same direction.
3) The US is offshoring jobs precisely because of its lack of regulations to keep them. The interests of corporate profit have superseded the interests of the country, and corporations will always seek the most profitable arrangement for their bottom line, even if it means destroying the economy of the country in which they originated.
4) It's actually the far right - groups such as the constitution party, tea party, and libertarians - who most consistently and thoroughly violate the rights laid out in the constitution because the far right has always been authoritarian. It does not view individual rights as important, instead considering adherence to their prescribed social order as tantamount.
5) This is a blatant cry to theocracy and confounds opposition to war and debauchery as strictly the purview of religion, when opposition to both are universal to every culture in the world outside of the far right. The US social fabric is falling apart because of its economic policies that increase inequality, institutionalize racism and xenophobia, and promote greed and war, not because it's a secular form of government.
All in all, theocracy for the win! Oh wait...
Endrael · Mon Oct 25, 2010 @ 02:08am · 0 Comments |
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