by Justin Soutar
As another Independence Day has come and gone,
and as a sharply divided America marches inexorably onward to her two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary in 2026, I find myself reflecting on what has happened
to our beloved country due to the coronavirus epidemic of the last several
months. Specifically to date, the virus has infected millions of Americans,
killing more than 100,000 of these; has spawned a climate of public anxiety,
fear, and isolation, in turn leading to increased mental illness and various
forms of abuse; has shut down millions of businesses deemed “non-essential”;
has sparked unprecedented growth in the medical services and sanitation
industries; has provoked authoritarian public safety measures unilaterally imposed
by national and state government on individuals, voluntary associations,
schools, churches, and businesses; has unrelentingly dominated mainstream media
coverage; has precipitated a major economic recession resulting in double-digit
unemployment and temporary shortages of essential goods; and has led to the
most expensive economic stimulus law ever enacted, generating a massive
increase in our already gargantuan national debt.
Taken together, the COVID-19 emergency and the
broad scope of the official response from government, health care, business,
the media and entertainment industry, schools, and churches has dramatically
and profoundly altered the landscape of American society overnight. The individual
aspects of this response to our national public health crisis—which itself has
been just one small part of a worldwide health emergency—have tended to be
interlocking and mutually reinforcing, forming a remarkably effective matrix of
national defense against a dangerous invisible enemy. Indeed, the nationwide
figures for infection and death from the coronavirus to date fall far short of
the apocalyptic predictions from certain medical sources early this year.
Understandably frightened by the threat of a
rapidly spreading virus that they were told had no cure, the great majority of
American citizens unquestioningly accepted the litany of stringent government
restrictions on their public and private lives, from social distancing and bans
on gatherings to closure of schools and businesses and stay at home orders, as
necessary to protect the common good in this particular situation. They were
entirely willing to sacrifice certain liberties to which they were accustomed
for the sake of safety and survival, and they generally trusted that government
was acting in their best interests.
There is no question that strict national and
state laws based on expert recommendations from the CDC and NIH have greatly
limited the spread of the virus and reduced its death toll. But did the gravity and
risks of the threat actually require such a sweeping, dictatorial response? Should
the recommendations of a sprawling and inefficient federal bureaucracy
automatically become the law of the land without discussion and consideration
by the people and their congressional representatives? Did slowing the spread of
the virus and reducing infections and deaths really warrant this massive
government intrusion into our daily lives, infringing on our God-given and constitutionally
protected rights to freedom of religion and assembly and speech and movement
and commerce? Did the American public and church leaders act prudently by
quietly accepting and obeying such laws? Did the public health crisis justify
the nearly wholesale government shutdown of the economy and the lasting consequences
that ensued, or a stimulus package that adds trillions of dollars to a crushing
national debt already in excess of $20 trillion? Can select provisions of our
Constitution and some semblance of fiscal responsibility be legitimately set aside
in a national emergency?
The key question of how far government can rightly go to protect our national
security without encroaching on our cherished civil liberties was extensively
debated in the early years of the War on Terrorism. Both security and liberty are essential to the
common good and to the survival and prosperity of any nation. It is the
responsibility and the challenge of duly elected government both to keep us
safe and to protect our freedom in such a way that security and freedom are harmoniously
balanced. All of the above yes or no questions can be more or less summed up in
this one: Are public safety and national security more important than human
freedom and individual liberty? Those who would unhesitatingly answer “Yes”
place themselves in direct opposition to our nation’s Founders, who unhesitatingly
answered “No” to this same question more than two hundred years by daring to
rebel against the tyrannical British Crown. As Patrick Henry famously cried
out: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!” And Benjamin Franklin calmly
remarked in the same vein: "Those who would surrender their cherished
liberty, for a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty, nor
safety." The South Dakota governor's comment that people should have the
freedom to get sick and die may have generated a storm of protest, but it was certainly
in keeping with the Founders’ perspective. Such ardent champions of human
liberty, limited government, and fiscal restraint would not have approved of
the federal and state governments’ wholesale interventions against the
coronavirus, complete with record-busting deficit spending to try to revive an
economy consigned to limbo by their own heavy-handed policies.
Classically educated,
devout Christian, and wise men that they generally were, the Framers were aware
that ancient Roman law provided for a temporary dictator in times of war and
crisis. They certainly foresaw that our nation would also experience various
kinds of crises and emergencies in future decades and centuries. Yet they were
also painfully aware from history and their own experience as British colonists
of the perennial truth that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. Thus the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that they painstakingly
crafted to guide our nation do not include any provisions allowing any part of
them to be set aside during a national emergency. The purpose of this
deliberate omission is clear: Americans’ God-given and unalienable rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are to be respected and protected
by government at all times, regardless of the circumstances in which the nation
finds herself. Individual liberties may not be sacrificed on the altar of
national security. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights have no expiration date.
Unfortunately, faced with the coronavirus
epidemic, our government has apparently and unilaterally decided that
protecting the public health is more important than preserving the individual
liberties of the American people. Yet even a casual look at the draconian state
and federal response to the pandemic reveals that the sinister agenda of big-government
socialism is at work. Unelected federal bureaucrats, Democratic state governors
and elected representatives of both parties have all taken advantage of the
virus situation to enlarge the size of government far beyond its proper and
reasonable bounds, in the process catering to special interest groups that run
the political and media show in Washington and state capitols, running
roughshod over the Constitution, and abandoning any pretense of fiscal
conservatism. For example, the $2 trillion CARES Act, with its chunks of
pork-barrel spending for Big Agriculture and the performing arts, is an
outrageous travesty of justice because it adds further weight to our already unsustainable
national debt burden. And the same governors who have shuttered thrift stores,
libraries and movie theaters and severely restricted public gatherings for
worship in their states have kept Planned Parenthood abortion mills running full
bore and allowed massive public demonstrations in large cities to proceed
unhindered. Such blatant hypocrisy is a staple of corrupt and godless socialist
government, and it clearly demonstrates that such politicians cannot be trusted
to guarantee public safety, let alone individual liberty.
What is even more shameful than this corrupt
and unconstitutional government, however, is that we the people of the United
States as a whole have quietly tolerated and passively accepted this new level
of government tyranny and fiscal recklessness. Sadly, this is just part of an
early twenty-first century trend in which we have been gradually relinquishing many of
our God-given and constitutionally protected rights, especially our privacy
rights, to big government and big business, the two great enemies of the common
person. We’ve allowed the federal government to take over our health care
through the Affordable Care Act. We’ve allowed the Supreme Court to redefine marriage and sex contrary to natural law. We’ve allowed cell phones and other
electronic devices to track our location and movement and send that information
to a government database. We’ve allowed websites and browsers to track our
Internet habits and preferences. We’ve allowed Microsoft unrestricted access to
our private emails in Outlook. We’ve allowed Apple admittance to our digital
storage files. We’ve allowed state government to tax our Internet purchases. We’ve
allowed eBay and PayPal to track our buying and selling habits and sell and
rent that information to third parties. We’ve allowed software vendors to sign
us up for unwanted automatic renewal just so we can purchase their software in
the first place. We’ve allowed Congress and our President to spend tens of
trillions of dollars we don’t have. And now we’ve allowed our leaders to confine
us to our homes, shut down our restaurants and businesses and schools
and libraries, ban unnecessary travel, forbid us to gather in a church
building or anywhere else, and spend trillions more dollars we don’t have.
Apparently, our cherished human rights and fiscal
responsibility are not so cherished anymore, because we are too timid and unwilling
to fight for them when they are threatened or to hold our government
accountable when it tramples on them. Two centuries ago, America was “the land
of the free and the home of the brave,” but now it seems to be the land of the
chained and the home of the cowed. Like the grumbling Israelites in the desert,
we seem to prefer slavery to freedom. If we now truly value safety above
liberty, then we certainly deserve to be neither safe nor free.
The great pandemic of 2020 is a moment of
reckoning for the American people. Will we timidly continue to allow big
government and big business ever-increasing control over all aspects of our
daily lives? Or will we courageously stand up and boldly demand that our
leaders govern in accordance with the Constitution and fiscal sanity, thus simultaneously
ensuring our security, prosperity and freedom? The choice we make will
determine not only our future, but the future of the twenty-first century
world.
How ironic it is that the coronavirus epidemic
originated in Communist China, whose repressive anti-religious government has
been trampling on the human rights of its vast people for decades and whose
leaders are now positioning the country to replace the United States as the
leading world superpower, thus threatening the liberty of billions of people.
In a written statement published by ZENIT on April 3, Cardinal Charles Bo, the
Archbishop of Yangon, Myanmar and president of the Asian bishops’ conference,
publicly and courageously denounced the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) government for deliberately allowing the virus to spread throughout the
city of Wuhan for three weeks and intimidating, arresting, and imprisoning
doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the Chinese public of the threat
during that period.
Indeed, it is not only possible, but likely, that the radically secularist
CCP regime deliberately orchestrated the release of the virus from their state-controlled
lab in Wuhan as a biological weapons experiment on their own people and the
rest of humanity. If that is the case,
then we have been offered a terrifying glimpse of the brave new world the
Chinese Communists are planning to create within the next few decades. If
their short-term goals were to sicken millions and kill hundreds of
thousands, to spread fear and panic through media propaganda, to
close churches and cripple voluntary associations, to restrict freedom of
movement and association, to isolate and confine hundreds of millions, to
promote government takeover of public and private life, and to damage thriving free-market
economies, they could hardly have done a better job in all of those areas.
With one tiny virus, the CCP has powerfully influenced the entire world,
including its ideological arch-enemy, the United States.
The COVID-19 plague--which is actually among
the smaller and less devastating epidemics of ancient and modern
history--should sound the alarm to freedom-loving people everywhere that the
once sleeping giant of Communist China is now awake, aggressive, and dangerous.
Politically, economically, technologically, militarily and in many other ways,
China has been gearing up for many years now to take over the world by the
middle of this century. Given the glaring distinction between America’s
traditional Judeo-Christian values and the atheistic ideology of Communism,
this will have profoundly negative consequences for the entire human
family, as tyranny will replace freedom around the globe.
If we do not wish this
grim future to become a reality, then we must immediately take concrete steps
to strengthen our own country and develop a comprehensive long-term foreign
policy plan so that we can effectively fight, and win, a lengthy "Cold
War" with the Chinese Communists, just as we did with the Russian
Communists in the last century. To begin with, we should fiscally discipline ourselves by balancing the
federal budget within four years and cutting our 14-figure national
debt in half by 2030. This all-out effort will require unity, education,
wisdom, determination, courage, and perseverance in order to be successful. The United States versus China will be the
signature foreign policy battle of the twenty-first century. If we the people of the United States will recover
the Founders’ zeal for liberty, return wholeheartedly to our Judeo-Christian
founding principles and to the Constitution based on them, and place our trust
in God, then we will not only enjoy the twin blessings of liberty and security
in harmonious coexistence for ourselves and our children, but the rest of the
world will be a more free and secure place for our brothers and sisters in the
human family.
Copyright © 2020 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
