Revolting

A friend sent me a fb message yesterday w/a needed word of caution about my posts yesterday. They were sarcastic; prompted by anger at the Supreme Court decision on the healthcare bill. I need & want to apologize to you all. I know some of you feel there’s no need to apologize but I do, because I’m called to honor those in authority, even when I disagree with them. (Romans 13) I dishonored them with my snarky comments. I erred–forgive me. Having said & meant that in all sincerity, there’s a further issue in all this that I want to share. Here’s my blog article to explain –

The Supreme Court yesterday finagled approval for the individual mandate of the new health care bill. They said they could not approve it under the Commerce clause, but that they could justify it as a new tax, since Congress has the power under the Constitution to make new taxes. Yet the current administration, who’s project the health care reform bill was, campaigned for it by vehemently saying it wasn’t a tax! When the administrations lawyers appeared before the Court and saw that it wasn’t going to pass muster under the Commerce clause, they shifted it to a tax; and Chief Justice John Roberts (in highly suspicious manner) agreed with the left-leaning justices to approve it.

Listening to the news as the decision was first read, I was furious. Not on partisan grounds; but on purely practical and policy grounds. This advances the wickedness of socialism like no other moment in recent history. It is clear from Obama’s campaign in 2007 and 8 that he wanted to steer the USA into socialism. There’s no disputing that. Yesterday’s Court decision marks the moment when he wrenched the steering wheel and set the nation into that course. This isn’t hyperbole, exaggeration, or incendiary rhetoric; it’s the way it is.

The power to tax is the power to control. The Federal Government has just taken over control of a major portion of the nation’s economy. Their bailout and economic stimulus packages of a few years ago secured a controlling interest in other portions of the economy. Regulations, specially in the realm of environmental protection, have stretched the reality of control into hundreds of other fields. All told, the Federal government now, through taxes and regulations has become Big Brother; not yet of Orwellian-nature—but give it time.

Isn’t THAT the VERY THING the Founders sought to protect AGAINST in our Constitution? Wasn’t the principle of States and individual liberty their goal, and the federal government was supposed to be an agency that protected and advanced that goal? Didn’t they frame the Constitution such that the power of the federal government was to maximize liberty and safeguard it?

Socialism is the opposite of everything they believed in and worked for. EVERYTHING! It is a betrayal of what the United States was supposed to be the great experiment for. I guess today’s crowd thinks the experiment failed, so they are nudging the country into the very thing the Founders loathed; a nation where the central government rules coercively over its citizens.

Though the conditions are different, it was this centralized coercion the colonies rebelled in the late 1770’s. For decades, historians and theologians have debated how the Founders, steep as they were in a Biblical worldview, could justify armed rebellion against England. The answer isn’t short, but it is important. By reading their writings, best summed up in the Declaration of Independence (timely, since next week is the 4th of July) we discern they justified severing ties with England because though they were legally British citizens, they were being denied their legal rights by the Crown and Parliament. (Even though many in Parliament sided with the Americans because they knew the way they were being treated was both illegal and immoral.) The British citizens in the colonies tried hard over a long time to secure their rights, but the laws and taxes passed on them became increasingly oppressive. They reasoned; When office holders violate the very laws they are supposed to enforce and all attempts to reason with them fail, it is the duty of the citizenry to move to make sure those rights are secured. So the colonies saw their Revolution as a morally justified war of defense of land and rights; those rights being legal both in the written laws of England and in natural law, the rights of all people at all times and places.

I wonder what counsel the Founders would offer us today if they could spend a week with us. After two days of constant weeping for how we’ve trashed their plan and dashed their dream, I wonder what they would say to us about our course forward.

Both of the major political parties have failed the American people. I’m no expert, but the lesser parties seem to be based on questionable ideologies.

What we need is transformation, a peaceful revolution that changes the hearts and minds of men and women. Physical Violence is NOT THE WAY. But nothing less than a violent spiritual revolution must take place if our future is to be anything other than totalitarian socialism because we are no on the fast-track there.

The change we need, the only change that can set our course aright is for the hearts of tens of millions of Americans to turn to God.

Revive us again, O God.