Loyal To LibertyBeta

"I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don't contract them."

"My Christian faith compels me to acknowledge that marriage was instituted by God as an exclusively heterosexual covenant," Sen. Obama said. "In fact, the California constitution's preamble actually affirms God's sovereignty saying, "We, the People of the State of California, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, in order to secure and perpetuate its blessings, do establish this Constitution."

"However," he said, "when the courts determine that a constitution, under God, permits something God forbids, the Harvard law school grad in me has to respect that. I believe the people pushing Proposition 8 are wrong to try to ban a practice that I also think is wrong, by changing a constitution that acknowledges God's in charge in order to prevent something God opposes."

(Barack Obama response to MTV, 9/1/2008)

In order to keep susceptible Christian voters (including many Black Americans) from suspecting his leadership, Barack Obama has flaunted his belief in God, and pretended to have views that align with Christian teachings. This pretense has been particularly on display when it comes to his statements about marriage. You see, he's not in favor of gay marriage. He's just against any effort to prevent it from being forced upon resistant majorities throughout the United States.

Like his position on child-murder, this stance repeats the corrupted logic characteristic of nineteenth century Whig politicians anxious to curry favor with pro-slavery forces without losing votes from anti-slavery constituents. The pro-slavery forces were determined to prevent States with anti-slavery majorities from interfering by law with the spread of slavery. Meanwhile, they worked to secure a Supreme Court ruling that would enshrine slave ownership as a constitutionally protected property right. This was the gist of the pro-slavery conspiracy Abraham Lincoln shrewdly espied in his famous "House Divided' speech (from which I recently quoted the relevant conclusion.)

Like those not altogether deceitful antebellum Whig politicos, Obama wears two masks. Of course, neither represents his true face. For example, he pretends to respect the requirements of loving human relationships. Meanwhile, he pushes a health proposal that would substitute impersonal calculations and bureaucratic formulas for decisions that reflect the loving relations that are supposed to exist between children and their aging parents or grandparents. He makes a show of respect for the existence of God, and even alludes to the people's grateful acknowledgment of God' authority as the source of freedom. But meanwhile, he systematically denies the obligation of the people conscientiously to respect God's authority in their use of the freedom they obtain from Him.

We get a glimpse of Obama's true face, however, when he makes clear that the attitude that governs his thinking is not his respect for people, his respect for God or his respect for constitutions established in light of God's authority. It is subservience to the dogmas inculcated by his Harvard Law School education. This includes the self-serving doctrine that, once they become judges, lawyers like himself can dictate the content of constitutions and laws regardless of the will of God or the consent of the people.

Obama pretends to believe in God while denying, in practice, the sovereignty of God. What else are we to make of the obnoxious doctrine that it's "wrong to try to ban a practice…in order to prevent something God opposes." According to the Ten Commandments, God opposes murder, theft and perjury. Is it wrong to try to ban such practices? Obviously not; but in all fairness, Obama doesn't say it's wrong to ban them. He says that it's wrong to ban them "in order to prevent something God opposes." The wrongness consists in the aim or intention to respect the will of God.

As all Christians know, Christ says that we should seek first the kingdom of God, i.e., the place where God is sovereign. The primary motive of Christian action is therefore respect for God's sovereignty. Obama claims to be a Christian. Yet he declares that it's wrong for people to act "in order to prevent something God opposes." He says it's wrong for them to act with the aim or motive Christ prescribes as the first priority of Christian conscience.

Clearly, Obama believes that in the political realm it's wrong to be motivated by respect for God's sovereignty; in the political realm, it's wrong to acknowledge God's will as the basis for action. Now, our motive is that which gives rise to our motions, the will in consequence of which motion takes place. But what has life without motion? What indeed, except for God. According to Christian belief, God set the universe in motion. He is the source of all creation. So all living things move and have their life in consequence of His will. As Creator, ruler and judge of the universe His authority is invoked in the political document that first declared the independence of the United States.

For all his lip service to God, Obama takes the contrary position that the political realm somehow lies outside of God's kingdom. Political action may not properly be based on an effort to "prevent what God opposes", i.e., keep action within the limits or boundaries established by God. But once we have discarded the notion that it is right to respect the limits upon action implied by God's will, what becomes of the principle that confines the exercise of government power within limits that secure the God-ordained rights of individuals? What becomes of the people's obligation before God to act in order to prevent the destruction of those rights? What becomes of the discipline and courage connected with their sense of that obligation? Where God-ordained right is not respected, can God-given rights be maintained?

Though articulated in the context of a discussion of so-called 'gay marriage', Obama's position involves rejecting the premise of God-given and unalienable rights that is the foundation of constitutional government. It reveals the true face hidden beneath the masks he fashions to serve his ambition. It is a face distorted by the lust for raw, unbridled power. It is the face characteristic of those who dream of a world in which triumphant power has once and for all slipped the leash of conscience, a leash made effective by the people's willingness to act from motives that respect and rely upon the sovereign power of God. Tragically for America, the world they dream of will be one in which there is no freedom left except the freedom to be enslaved, by our undisciplined fears and passions, to the tyrants who most successfully manipulate them.

Tom Sowell's article "Is 'death panels' charge over the top?" is one of those concise, factual, faultlessly logical pieces that make his work a consistently indispensable intellectual resource. He cuts through the deceptive phrases being used to disguise the unpalatable truth about the Obama faction's drive to take over the health sector of the U.S. economy. He uses Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's own words to make clear that when the Obama faction's apologists say their proposals target the "over-utilization" of Health care services what they have in their sights "is not quantity but quality."

"At one time, it would have been none of Dr. Emanuel's business if your physician prescribed the latest medications for you, rather than the cheaper and obsolete medications they replaced. It would have been none of his business if you preferred to have a nice hospital room with "amenities" rather than being in an unsanitary ward with inadequate nursing care, as under the National Health Service in Britain. The involvement of government gives Dr. Emanuel the leverage to condemn other Americans' choices- and a larger involvement of government will give him the power to force both doctors and patients to change their choices."

Sowell's analysis reveals the takeover strategy that informs every element of the national socialists' policy agenda. Under the guise of compassion and a desire to help people in need, they propose approaches that rely on tax funded government resources. The involvement of those resources naturally leads to the assertion that a larger government role is both logical and necessary to guard against waste and malfeasance. This government role leverages its control of the activity in question, removing choice from private entities and individuals to political bosses and government bureaucrats.

The Obama faction's bid for control of the health sector has for a moment opened the eyes of many Americans, allowing them momentarily to glimpse the true nature and goals of the national socialists (so-called "liberals" among the Democrats, so-called "moderates" among the Republicans.) But will these awakened Americans think through what this flash of perception has allowed them to see?

According to the old saying, 'the devil is in the details'. And it's true that the threat to our health care freedom has been revealed by careful attention to the details of the voluminous "reform" legislation. (Like the so-called 'stimulus' bill it was purposefully made long and involved to discourage attention to those details.) But the legislation isn't threatening because of its details. The details are threatening because the real purpose of the legislation has never been to improve health services, but to subvert and ultimately eliminate America's freedom.

The health proposals ultimately deal with matters of life and death personally critical to many Americans. In this context, the threat to freedom feels very personal, the danger it poses very real and intimate. But is the national socialists' takeover of the banking system any less so? Is their takeover of education any less so? Is their bid to eliminate the right to keep and bear arms any less so? Is the so called 'cap and trade' legislation to allow a national socialist government monopoly to ration pursuit and distribution of energy resources any less so? Is the national socialists' surrender of our sovereign control of the nation's borders any less so?

We should feel personally endangered by each and all of these supposedly well-intentioned "reforms". How can any of them be well-intentioned when all of them arise from the intention to impose government control. They use tax funded government resources, and/or the rhetoric of "progress", "equity" and "reform", as baited hooks with which to entice Americans toward the fatal surrender of their choices, their responsibilities, their freedom.

But the greatest personal threat arises from the suppression of the very idea that we are "persons"- individuals whose existence represents the assertion of intrinsic worth, and whose lives cannot rightly be regarded as mere objects for scientific calculation and administration. This disregard of human personality is the deep perversion of moral conscience that lies at the root of the Obama faction's embrace of child murder through abortion and infanticide. It lies at the root of their effort to create a regime that pressures older people to surrender their will to live. It lies at the root of their abandonment of the American principles of justice that recognize unalienable human rights. It lies at the root of their disregard for the just requirement that government be based on the liberty of the people, not the will of supposedly enlightened elites arrogantly acting as if elections make them our rulers rather than our representatives.

If the Obama faction's bid to take over health care has truly opened the eyes of the Americans who feel personally threatened by it, then in the months to come they will unite- not only in opposition to this or that proposal with which they disagree, but in a simple, unyielding determination to reject the strategy for socialist tyranny all these proposals represent. The devils may be lurking in the details. But we won't find safety by joining them there. To find safety, we must cast them out.

WND reports that "Glenn Beck fans are fighting back... "against an Obama faction effort to destroy the advertiser base for Beck's Fox News commentary program. "Now a husband and wife team of Beck fans has launched a website-DefendGlenn.com- that lists the contact information for advertisers for Beck's and other Fox News programs…" Though the Obama faction effort purports to be a reaction to Beck's remark that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," I suspect that their real motivation has more to do with the role he has played as a focal point for opposition to the Obama faction's drive to subject the United States to a totalitarian national socialist regime. People who oppose their intention should do more than applaud the defenders of Beck's freedom of speech; they should pitch in and help them out.

That said, I find myself unable to agree with Beck's statement about Obama's anti-white attitudes. Casting Obama as some kind of anti-white racist re-enforces the false notion that he speaks from or in any way represents the aggrieved heart of black Americans, the heart that tragically leads some black people (like Henry Gates and other members of the leftist black elite) to wallow incessantly in the world of hurt connected with what they feel is the persistent reality of white racism in America. All too often, however, the wallowing has an ironic "the lady doth protest too much" (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2) quality about it: Blacks who enjoy all the benefits and prestige American society can offer, using exaggerated gestures of condemnation of white racism to affirm their continued identification with the plight of other, less favored blacks. Is their show of angry resentment for the benefit of those less favored, or does it mainly serve to exploit (for "professional" purposes?) the embarrassed guilt that still influences the actions of so many other Americans who wish conscientiously to deal with the nation's heritage of racial injustice, fear and mistrust?

Barack Obama surely epitomizes this ironic exploitation of racial embarrassment. It was, and continues to be, a ruthlessly deployed weapon in his arsenal for political warfare. Consider for example elements of the Obama faction who now absurdly claim that people who notice and declare Obama's commitment to totalitarian national socialism are doing so because he's black. Actually, Obama's commitment to totalitarian socialism is more likely related to the emotional role and influence of anti-American leftists (e.g., his mother, Frank Davis, Bill Ayers) in his life and upbringing than to the facts of his racial biology.

After his father abandoned him, these communist/leftist figures provided emotional compensation for that abandonment. Did they redirect the pain and resentment it occasioned away from his father? Did their ideological fervor refocus it instead against the supposedly unjust American economic and political system? The hatred most characteristic of those who influenced Obama's emotional core is not hatred of whites or of white culture- it's hatred of the United States and of all that it stood for while leading the fight against expansive international communism.

Nothing about Barack Obama authentically represents or invokes the heritage of black Americans. Throughout his career he has championed the so-called right to abortion. From its inception with people like Margaret Sanger, to its genocidal implications for black Americans today, the promotion of a so called right to murder children in the womb has been allied with forces aiming to eliminate "inferior" races from the catalogue of human existence. (Given the anti-black implications of his fanatical commitment to the abortion agenda, the question arises: Did Obama's emotional pain over his father's abandonment result in sub-rosa resentment against his black racial heritage?) Authentic Christian faith has also been characteristic of the black American identity, reflecting the Gospel of love and reverence for God's will. That is a far cry from the peculiar mélange of race hatred and covert Islamism that claimed Obama's allegiance as a member of the congregation that assembled to hear the hate speech that passed for sermonizing in Reverend Jeremiah Wright's services.

And despite the leftist cant characteristic of the manipulated media's preferred black figureheads, many black Americans reject totalitarian socialist schemes to establish government domination and repression. Like my father, they donned the uniform of America's armed forces and fought with courage, pride and good conscience against the communist/national socialist devaluation of unalienable rights, and its collectivist/elitist assault on respect for the intrinsic worth of each and every human life.

Given Obama's upbringing, the self-avowed leftist predilections of his university life, the socialist stances characteristic of his brief political career, and the national socialist policies he is trying to force on the American people today, I would suggest that his race has nothing to do with the deep animus that characterizes his policies and actions. The target of his ill will isn't just whites- its black Americans, Jews, Asians, South Asians, Africans, Hispanics and yes, Europeans, Aussies and Brits, indeed any human beings who hold fast to the idea of liberty and the principles of God ordained human rights and moral dignity from which it springs. Rather than surrendering to the racial division Obama seeks to exploit, Americans of all backgrounds should unite on the common ground of decent humanity offered by our American creed.

One thing is becoming increasingly clear: the forces seeking to destroy constitutional self-government and impose socialism on the people of the United States appear to have underestimated the intelligence and will of the American people. The town hall uprisings have roused an arrogant, angry reaction from the Obama faction's political and media hacks. It reeks of surprised indignation. 'How dare these people prove more intelligent and feisty than we expected?' they seem to say. Their surprise more and more appears to be the only thing about them that is not insincere; that and their hunger for power.

It appears that many successful public figures in America have a quiet but deep contempt for the people whose support and adulation makes their apparent success possible. People who reach for fame and public applause often seem to suffer from a stubborn sense of vulnerable inferiority. They need public attention as an antidote to their own feelings of worthlessness. But as they receive the attention they crave, those feelings lead them to regard their own lives as a skillfully executed con game, in which they have sold hapless suckers stock in what they themselves feel to be a worthless enterprise. This leads them to conclude that people fool enough to be manipulated into supporting and admiring them will fall for anything.

A manipulative mentality dominates the competition for public power that today we mistakenly refer to as 'politics'. It affirms and feeds this contempt for 'the public'. Fortunes are made selling wealthy elites on the notion that, using the right polls and focus groups, expert consultants can figure out the goads and spurs of public reaction. Then they can package malleable individuals into candidates who will achieve the desired electoral response. The package may be empty, or its contents diametrically opposed to any real public good. But in this scheme of things, the outward appearance is all that matters, though it be entirely fictional.

So far the political result suggests that the consultants have delivered on their promises. People at the town meetings may raise chants intended to remind officeholders that "You work for us." But given the way politics works these days that makes no more sense than it would for the clay to tell the pottery "We made you what you are." In contemporary politics, the money powers, and the media they manipulate are the hands that mold the body politic until it accepts an image of leadership that no more serves the people than the pottery serves the clay.

In order to escape the domination of these manipulative forces, people will have to rediscover the resources that allow them to fashion- of, by, and for themselves- a political leadership that serves their common good. But what resources exist that allow people to resist the manipulation of their apparent desires and remember instead the goods that correspond to their true selves? The answer: resources that lie beyond manipulation because they reflect a standard of good that does not depend on malleable passion; resources that arise in connection with our respect for truths that confirm a source of meaning for our existence that subsists beyond the perishing satisfactions of the moment, but not beyond the reach of our conscience or goodwill. Content to judge leaders by the empty rhetoric they use to titillate our selfish passions, we will end up being judged, by those very passions, as fit only for slavery. But if we judge instead in light of the standard established by the Creator God who fashioned us for liberty, the discipline we accept in the judgment will help to keep us truly free; that and the faith that makes it possible.

In a society once renowned for its dedication to open, even raucous discussion and debate it's shocking to witness an increasingly systematic effort to suppress any views that run counter to the zealous stupefaction that characterizes the Obama media claque. Because of his willingness to recognize the need for a factual resolution of the issues being raised with respect to Obama's Constitutional eligibility for the Office of President of the United States, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is being attacked, described as a "far-right hater", and subjected to a campaign for his removal from the network. In the same vein, "Jon Klein, the chief of CNN's U.S. operations, has issued orders that no more talk-radio hosts will be allowed on CNN News programs… ." Because he has championed the views of those in opposition to the Obama faction's national socialist makeover of American society, the Obama faction has now made Glenn Beck the target of "a furious campaign…culminating in major companies such as Geico and Lawyers.com pulling their spots from the Fox News star's daily show."

It appears that one of the key hallmarks of the much touted change heralded by the Obama faction is the substitution of repression for debate when it comes to dealing with opposing views. The faction's corporate fellow travelers on the road to the new national socialist order now openly seek to eliminate from the public platforms they control views that don't conform to their elite party line. Their efforts remind me of what Major Sean M. Hoyer observed about the environment for thought created at the inception of the Third Reich in the mid-twentieth century. "The individual intellectual capacity was greatly degraded….The Nazis sought to completely own the minds of their minions."

Ownership of the mind (or as Thomas Jefferson put it "tyranny over the mind") is the indispensable prerequisite of successful dictatorship. The will of the rulers must provide the only criteria of reality. Facts, experience, logic- all must give way to their will. The frenzied invective against people who question the specious evidence thus far put forward regarding Obama's eligibility for President is a perfect instance of this tyrannical imposition.

As direct evidence of Obama's citizen status, the media agents highly paid by the Obama faction's corporate fellow travelers have relied upon the Certification of Live Birth published on the internet during the presidential campaign. As a matter of fact, 1) at the time of Obama's birth, such certificates were issued for babies born on foreign soil; and 2) the published form contains no indication of the facts that usually serve to substantiate the physical location of a baby's birth (such as the hospital where he was born, or the signature and/or name of the doctor who delivered the baby.)

As a matter of law, 1) Obama's father was a foreign national; and 2)according to the law at the time, his mother was not of age to transmit citizenship by blood. He therefore had no claim to US citizenship at birth unless he was born on US soil. This makes it necessary to ascertain exactly the facts omitted on the published form of the Certification of Live Birth. Hence the simple demand for the release of the long form Birth Certificate that should contain the required information.

People who insist on this evidence are not necessarily questioning Obama's eligibility. Lou Dobbs has repeatedly stated that he believes Obama is a natural born citizen, as the Constitution requires. His sin (if it is one) is that he understands the need to substantiate this belief with something other than statements by Obama, his press secretary or other government officials. He dares to acknowledge that it is reasonable to demand factual evidence. But this demand implies that the word and will of the government officials is not the sole criterion of reality. It implies that they are subject to scrutiny based on a standard of proof and reason they do not dictate, and which gives individuals legitimate grounds for independent thinking and judgment.

The frenzied effort to vilify, humiliate and discredit so-called 'birthers' thus reflects the underlying goal, which is for the proponents of the new national socialist order what it was for the henchmen of the old national socialist regime: to degrade individual intellectual capacity and own the mind of the people.

Thomas Jefferson pointed to the best antidote for this tyrannical ploy when he wrote "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." Obviously, the chains of the Constitution will be of no avail if its provisions are made to depend on confidence in the word and will of government officials no longer subject to the demand for factual evidence and logically reasoned proofs.

As the repression of individuals becomes more open and intense, it becomes increasingly clear that the issue at stake goes to the very heart of the survival of American freedom. As it began with the reasonable recognition of self-evident truths not dictated by human will and power, so it must end when the will and power of an arrogant elite are permitted to drive from the public square the common sense demand for a similarly independent and reasonable standard of truthfulness.