Quote of the Day

“The triumph of American independence was the result of the most extraordinary people in history, the most extraordinary culture in history, and the most extraordinary ideas in history, all creating the most extraordinary republic ever... Liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it and preserved it. The identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation, and America has a destiny like no other because we are a people like no other.”

–U.S. President Donald J. Trump, Address at Mount Rushmore, July 3, 2026

Quote of the Day

"This year [2015] marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the guardian of liberty, who labored tirelessly that 'this nation, under God, [might] have a new birth of freedom'. Building a future of freedom requires love of the common good and cooperation in a spirit of subsidiarity and solidarity.... The challenges facing us today call for a renewal of that spirit of cooperation, which has accomplished so much good throughout the history of the United States. The complexity, the gravity and the urgency of these challenges demand that we pool our resources and talents, and resolve to support one another, with respect for our differences and our convictions of conscience."

--Pope Francis, Address to Joint Session of United States Congress, September 24, 2015

Quote of the Day

"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."

--Benjamin Franklin

Quote of the Day

"I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.... [S]uch persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States.... And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God."

--Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863

Quote of the Day

"Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility…Only when it is free can development be integrally human; only in a climate of responsible freedom can it grow in a satisfactory manner."

--Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 17

Quote of the Day

Photo by Justin Soutar

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?"

--Thomas Jefferson

Quote of the Day

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

--Ronald Reagan (1911-2004),
U.S. President, 1981--1989

America v. China: Defending our Freedom in the Twenty-First Century

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.

Quote of the Day

 

"Our time is now. If we carry the day and turn the tide, we can hope that as long as men speak of freedom and those who have protected it, they will remember us, and they will say, 'Here were the brave and here their place of honor.'"

--Ronald Reagan

A Little History You Probably Didn't Know

"Contrary to a widespread misconception, the 56 signers did not sign as a group and did not do so on July 4, 1776. The official event occurred on August 2, 1776, when 50 men probably took part. Later that year, five more apparently signed separately and one added his name in a subsequent year. Not until January 18, 1777, in the wake of Washington's victories at Trenton and Princeton, did Congress, which had sought to protect the signers from British retaliation for as long as possible, authorize printing of the Declaration with all their names listed. At this time, Thomas McKean had not yet penned his name.

"The most impressive signature is that of John Hancock, President of Congress, centered over the others. According to tradition, Hancock wrote boldly and defiantly so that King George III would not need spectacles to identify him as a 'traitor' and double the reward for his head. The other Delegates signed in six columns, which ran from right to left. They utilized the standard congressional voting order, by colony generally from north to south: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

"Those who signed on August 2 undoubtedly did not realize that others would follow them and thus allowed no room to accommodate the signatures of the later six men. Two of them, George Wythe and Richard Henry Lee, found ample room above their fellow Virginians. One, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, crowded his name into the space between the Massachusetts and Rhode Island groups. Two of the others--Thomas McKean and Oliver Wolcott--signed at the bottom of columns following their State delegations. Only Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire needed to add his name separately from his colleagues--at the bottom of the first column on the right at the end of the Connecticut group."

--from the book Men of Freedom: Profiles of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (Pathmaker Books, 1975), pp. 23-24 (Note: In addition to biographical sketches of all fifty-six of the signers, this wonderful old book includes the historical background of the Declaration of Independence and tells what happened to the original document of the Declaration in the two hundred years following its publication. Unfortunately, this treasure has been out of print for many years and is now very difficult, if not impossible, to find.)

Defending our Freedom

As we Americans prepare to celebrate Independence Day less than two weeks from now, we American Catholics are observing the fifth annual Fortnight for Freedom declared by our bishops, a two-week period of prayer, fasting, education, and activism in support of religious liberty that always begins on June 21 and ends on the Fourth of July. Recognizing the increasing frequency and intensity of the attacks on freedom of religion by militant secularists, especially in our government and the courts but also in the media and our educational and cultural institutions, in the spring of 2012 our bishops published an important pastoral letter entitled "Our First, Most Cherished Liberty." In this document, our shepherds recalled America's rich tradition of religious freedom spanning four centuries; listed more than a dozen examples of recent attacks on that freedom; called the faithful to be vigilant in defending their hard-won religious liberties against the ever-mounting assault of radical secularism; and finally announced the first annual Fortnight for Freedom, which was promoted by EWTN and observed by Catholics across the United States.

Of course, the main event that led our bishops to establish this annual observance was the controversial HHS mandate bombshell dropped by the Obama administration in January of 2012, which demanded that health insurance plans across the country include artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients regardless of religious or moral objections to the distribution of such items. Although this mandate--the crucial centerpiece of the massively unpopular Affordable Care Act, generally known as ObamaCare--is still on the books four and a half years later, having been unfortunately upheld by the Supreme Court along with the rest of the ObamaCare travesty as somehow "constitutional" in June of 2012, dozens of lower court rulings against it have provided temporary injunctive relief to scores of Catholic and other Christian religious groups, healthcare providers, charitable organizations, universities, media entities, and other institutions that have rightly refused to comply with this unjust law despite the threat of crushing tax penalties. Furthermore, last year the Supreme Court ruled that most businesses that object to compliance with the mandate on religious grounds should be permanently exempt from it. So while some progress has been made against this particularly egregious and unconstitutional attack on our religious liberties, more remains to be done: it must be completely overturned.

Like the other freedoms we enjoy as Americans such as freedom of speech and of the press, freedom to peaceably assemble, and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, freedom of religion is a gift from our Creator that is guaranteed by our Constitution and must accordingly be protected by our government. No one should be forced into providing anti-life products and services that he or she considers immoral, against the dictates of his or her religion and conscience.

However, as Yuval Levin pointed out in an article in First Things magazine several months ago, we should beware of too narrowly individualistic, negative, and subjective an approach to religious liberty. Freedom of religion must not be confined to simply obtaining and retaining exemptions for certain individual persons and organizations that refuse to obey the law because they consider it wrong. Rather than being limited to a condescending exception for certain seemingly fanatical individuals within our society, religious liberty should be the rule for our society as a whole, as it was once upon a time. The idea here, which originated with our nation's founders, is that American society will flourish when all of its members are allowed to freely exercise their religious beliefs together as a community. In addition, it is fundamentally misguided to oppose the HHS mandate simply because we Catholics consider it an unjust law that attacks our religious liberties and moral conscience rights or simply because we Catholics regard contraceptives and abortifacients as immoral drugs. Such arguments are too narrowly focused and too subjective to be really convincing in the long run, and our radically secularist opponents have already seized on those weaknesses to bolster their own position. We must go deeper, building our defense on the bedrock of natural law and objective truth. Ultimately, we seek to rid America of the HHS mandate, not simply because we Catholics consider it an unjust law, but because it is an unjust law--not only for Catholics, but for pro-life Americans of all faiths and even for pro-life atheists. It isn't just an attack on our religious liberties and moral conscience rights; it's an attack on the natural law established by our Creator and upon our sacred right as human beings to act in accordance with that law.

Anchored firmly in the natural law, the concept of ordered liberty was a key founding principle of our nation that unfortunately is largely forgotten today. In a remarkably Catholic view of this concept, the Founders regarded freedom not as the totally unrestricted ability of human beings to do whatever the heck they may want to do, but rather as the ability to do what they ought to do, what they should do. While the freedom our Creator has given us is indeed very broad, it does have certain limits that He has laid down for our own good, and those limits are defined by the natural law, which is accessible to human reason. As long as we obey the natural law and thus act in accord with right reason, we remain truly free as individuals and as a nation. Morally speaking, to violate the natural law is an abuse of freedom, which was once commonly referred to as license or permissiveness.

A big part of the problem with America today is that we have largely abandoned this rational concept of ordered liberty rooted in the Creator's natural law in favor of a nebulous, ill-defined sort of "freedom" that is ultimately a product of moral relativism. In the past, our nation had laws prohibiting obscenity, indecency, and pornography in printed material and radio broadcasts; these entirely reasonable laws, which reflected the natural law, benefited our society by discouraging certain forms of immorality, which naturally helped to protect our freedom. No one at the time ever claimed that these laws violated anyone's right to freedom of speech. But if someone today advocates for bringing back such laws, he or she is derided as a crackpot fundamentalist who opposes freedom of speech. That's a shame. We must revive this forgotten concept of ordered liberty based on "the laws of nature and nature's God" in order to re-learn the true meaning of freedom, so that we can preserve this treasure and hand it on to future generations.

This is the first full Fortnight for Freedom since the Supreme Court's infamous ruling last June that overturned dozens of state marriage laws by elevating immoral homosexual relationships to the legal status of marriage throughout the country. As with the Obama administration's HHS mandate, this terribly misguided and wrong decision is not just a major attack on our religious liberties, but constitutes an assault on the Creator's natural law, in which the union of a man and a woman is the primary social institution for the good of the couple, their children, and the whole society. As we fight to defend our religious freedom on this particular front, our well-reasoned arguments must be grounded in the objective truth of the natural law and borne out by the personal witness of our own lives in order to resonate with the widest possible audience and effectively influence public opinion.

Returning to what was said above about the communal aspect of religious freedom, it should be underscored that only a truly religious people will value, fight for, protect, and defend their religious liberty. America's founders and colonists who fought for our independence from Britain and established our nation were deeply religious people of devout Christian faith, and we considered ourselves a Christian country until very recently. As the pseudo-religion of radical secularism increasingly dominates American society and strives to supplant the Judeo-Christian philosophy that made us a great nation, the question naturally arises as to whether we will remain a religious people tenaciously committed to defending our first freedom in an increasingly hostile cultural climate, or whether we will eventually surrender to the forces of militant secularism and allow this cherished freedom to be stolen from us by a handful of godless elitist pirates who have commandeered our Ship of State. It is to be hoped that we the people will retain the courage to stand up and retake control of our nation from the high priests of radical secularism; to recover and proudly reassert our nation's traditional Christian identity; and to consistently and vigorously defend the religious liberties and moral conscience rights of all Americans of good will, so that we can pass this great land on to our children and grandchildren as "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".

Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, pray for us!

Quote of the Day

"Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility....The preservation of freedom calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good and a sense of responsibility toward the less fortunate. It also demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one's deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate. In a word, freedom is ever new."

--Benedict XVI, Address to the American People, April 16, 2008

Quote of the Day

"The Church is the people who serve the Lord. For this, it is the people who experiences his freedom and lives in this freedom that He gives. The Lord always gives true freedom. First of all, the freedom from sin, from selfishness in all its forms: the freedom to give of oneself and to do so with joy, like the Virgin of Nazareth, who is free from herself, she does not close in on herself in her condition – and she would have had reason! – but thinks of those who, in that moment, has greater need. She is free in the freedom of God, which is realized in love. And this is the freedom that God has given us and we must not lose it: the freedom to adore God, to serve God and to serve him even in our brothers and sisters."

--Pope Francis

Happy Fourth of July

An elderly friend of mine passed this along via email. I haven't double checked to make sure it's all true, but I reckon most of it is. It helps you get into the proper spirit and remember what we are really celebrating today on Independence Day. Hope you enjoy it. Here it is:

JULY 4TH

Some interesting facts about our founders...scroll down for a little bit of history as we honor our nation's birthday.

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence ?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died.

Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured.

Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they?

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.

Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.

Thomas McKean was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, And poverty was his reward.

Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton.

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.

Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home only to find his wife dead and his children vanished.

So, take a few minutes while enjoying your 4th of July holiday and silently thank these patriots. It's not much to ask for the price they paid.

Remember: freedom is never free!

I hope you will show your support by sending this to as many people as you can. It's time we get the word out that patriotism is NOT a sin, and the Fourth of July has more to it than beer, picnics, and baseball games.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY AND GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!

Two Important Victories for Life and Liberty

Thanks be to God and to His Holy Mother, Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, for granting our nation two important victories for life and liberty at the end of last month. Both of these victories were decisions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court during the third annual Fortnight for Freedom.

On June 27, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional a law in Massachusetts that prohibited peaceful pro-life prayer warriors, protestors, and counselors from setting foot within thirty-five feet of an abortion clinic. No doubt strongly supported by Planned Parenthood, this so-called "buffer zone" law was a direct attack on freedom of speech. It was also an indirect attack on innocent human life, since its effect was to increase the number of abortions in the state of Massachusetts. Although the Court remained silent on the morality and legality of abortion, it had enough sense to clearly perceive the freedom of speech issue involved here. Now the pro-life movement in Massachusetts is free to do its important, life-saving work without interference from the state government. No doubt thousands of innocent unborn lives there will be saved in the coming years. Thanks be to God.

Then on June 30, the High Court handed down its widely anticipated decision in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case. By just one vote, the Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby and against the Obama administration, striking down part of the HHS mandate within ObamaCare that requires owners of secular for-profit businesses to include abortion-inducing drugs and contraceptives in their health insurance plans for their employees, even if this violates their religious beliefs and moral principles. The Court ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1993, applies to owners of for-profit businesses, and that the federal government cannot force them to violate their consciences. This is a great victory for our First Amendment rights, for our right to act in accord with the law of God, and also for the unborn across our country, many of whose lives will be spared as a result of this decision. Moreover, this ruling has significant implications for what is left of the HHS mandate and ObamaCare, which are both looking more and more like Swiss cheese. If for-profit owners of secular businesses who object to providing abortifacients and contraceptives for religious and moral reasons are exempt from the anti-life mandate, then why shouldn't directors of religious and secular not-for-profit organizations who object to it for similar reasons be exempted as well? Why shouldn't EWTN and Catholic and Christian colleges and hospitals be exempted? Why aren't their CEOs legally free to follow their religious and moral beliefs in their administration of education and health care?

The Obama administration's exemption for religious institutions currently in force is based on a very narrow definition of "religious institution" as an organization that primarily hires and serves members of its own faith. That leaves out practically 99 percent of religious institutions in this country, most of which are not exclusive or cultist but part of the broader society, hiring and serving people of all faiths and none at all. Some of these religious institutions have rightly won their own exemptions from the mandate in state and federal courts. The remainder are still being coerced by the Obama administration against their religion and conscience, and against the First Amendment, into providing coverage for anti-life drugs that have no health benefits whatsoever. This has to stop. The Supreme Court must confirm the more than two dozen injunctions already granted by lower courts to dozens of religious organizations, and extend them to all religious institutions in America. The federal government has no right to pick and choose who can freely practice their religion and follow their conscience and who cannot. Our Constitution forbids the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Therefore, the High Court must uphold the religious liberties and moral conscience rights of all Americans without exception. And that, necessarily, will mean the death of the HHS mandate and the demise of ObamaCare.

Once again, thanks be to God and His Holy Mother for these two victories for human life and liberty in our nation. We must keep praying and taking action to defend our God-given rights and liberties. Let freedom ring!

Reflection for Memorial Day

"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." --John 15:13

Every year on Memorial Day, we Americans take a break from our normal work routine to gratefully remember and honor all those men and women who have given their lives in military service to our country--those who have died defending our freedom. This annual holiday offers an opportunity to reflect on the true meaning of freedom, as our nation's great Founders understood this term.

Today we often think of freedom as the self-endowed, absolute and inviolable ability to do whatever we want to do, with no regard for an objective moral law. But this is an erroneous conception of freedom which is detached from any responsibility to God and to our fellow human beings, and if we all put it into practice it would result in social chaos and anarchy. By contrast, freedom properly understood is the ability to do what we ought to do--to choose good and reject evil, to live by the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Christ. Moreover, true freedom is a gift from our Creator, and it sets certain basic limits on human behavior for our own good. As Bill Donohue has clearly pointed out in his excellent book Why Catholicism Matters, our nation's Founders believed in "ordered liberty," that is, freedom to do the right thing in accordance with "the laws of nature and of nature's God."

We need to get back to this concept of ordered liberty anchored firmly in the objective and unchanging natural law established by our Creator. It is this concept and its implementation that has made us a great nation. Only if we understand and use our freedom properly will we return to greatness as a nation.

"Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen."

Four Victories

The last three weeks, including Holy Week, have seen four significant victories for the American people and their God-given inalienable rights against the fierce onslaught of their twin enemies, Big Government and Big Business.

Here in Virginia, earlier this month, for the first time in our state's history, our governor, Terry McAuliffe, had denied a permit to hold a prayer service on the National Day of Prayer at noon in front of the state capitol, using the excuse that this is the hour when people eat their lunch on the capitol grounds. This prayer service has always been held at noon, which allows people who work to participate in it during their lunch break. In a break from this longstanding tradition, the governor allowed the prayer service to be held at 1 PM instead, which would have prevented many people from participating. The Family Foundation raised a storm of protest, rightly pointing out that this was a blatant case of discrimination against religious believers that could not be tolerated. Republicans, Democrats and even the ACLU joined us in denouncing the governor's move. As a result, on April 11 Governor McAuliffe relented and announced that the prayer service could be held on the capitol grounds at noon as usual. This was a victory for religious liberty and a defeat for radical secularism.

In Colorado, a terrible abortion bill that would have repealed all state restrictions on the barbaric practice was defeated on Holy Thursday, just two days after Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver rallied Catholics across his diocese to pray in front of the state capitol on Tuesday, April 15 at 3 PM. Kudos to Archbishop Aquila for being a true leader and demonstrating the courage of his convictions by challenging the culture of death head on. This was a victory for the right to life of the innocent unborn in Colorado and a defeat for the abortion cartel, led by Planned Parenthood, which is desperate to stay in business as long as possible while public demand for abortion continues to decline steadily.

On April 16, Vermont became the first state in the Union to pass a law requiring all food products sold in the state that contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be labeled as containing GMOs. GMOs artificially alter the genetic structure of food crops, messing with the Creator's perfect design to produce bigger yields or make them resistant to chemical fertilizers. Although the purveyors of GMO crops claim that they are safe and healthy, a mass of troubling evidence is accumulating that tells a very different story: GMOs are harmful and destructive to human and animal health and the environment. Deep down, most Americans are rightly wary of GMO food products; surveys confirm that more than 80 percent of them want GMO food products labeled so that they can avoid purchasing them. We certainly have the right to know what's in our food and how it was grown. But Monsanto, America's leading producer of GMO food crops, has been fighting tooth and nail to protect its massive profits, spending millions of dollars on advertising campaigns to defeat GMO labeling legislation in California and other states and corrupting the FDA to ensure that GMOs remain legally hidden in thousands upon thousands of U.S. food products every year. The passage of this GMO labeling law in Vermont was a victory for American food safety, public health, and the right to know what's in our food--and a defeat for Monsanto, whose unscrupulous abuse of technology for profit and utter disregard for public health and the environment are finally getting the attention they deserve.

And finally, on April 22, Tuesday of Easter week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that an unborn child is a person, fully entitled to the same protections of the law as persons who have already been born. Such a ruling by any U.S. state or federal court is long overdue. Unborn children are persons with the same basic rights as born persons, and all courts and branches of government have a serious obligation to uphold that fact and protect those inalienable rights. Thank God there are at least a few good judges and one good court in this country that have enough common sense to render a just decision and have not been corrupted by Planned Parenthood and NARAL! This is a completely rational and logical decision that simply recognizes the objective truth of the matter—now well established by science—that the unborn child is a human person. This is a landmark decision properly grounded in natural law that protects the human rights of the innocent unborn in Alabama. Hopefully, other state courts will begin to follow suit with similar rulings to protect the right to life of the innocent unborn children in their jurisdictions as well. Moreover, this significant ruling marks the first time since Roe v. Wade that any U.S. court has explicitly acknowledged the personhood of the unborn child. Thus it signals a turning point—the beginning of a trend toward the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The misguided judges who saddled us with that horrible travesty of justice back in 1973 admitted that if the personhood of the unborn child could be established, then the rights of the fetus would be specifically guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbids depriving any innocent person of life. Such personhood being now definitively established, the conclusion is obvious: Roe v. Wade has no legal foundation in the Constitution.

These four victories for the unborn, for religious liberty, and for food safety underscore the importance of active involvement in the political arena by concerned citizens. Powerful corporate interests may increasingly dominate state and federal policies today and many bad things are happening as a result of ever more widespread government corruption, but that is no excuse to throw in the towel and say, "There's nothing I can do to change things." That's a lie from the Father of Lies, the Devil, and one of his choice strategies to further his wicked agenda is to convince good people to do nothing to stop it. There are two crucial things we can do to make a difference: 1) pray and 2) take action. Prayer is powerful and can change the course of history; it has done so many times. And timely and concerted political action can halt the march of destructive policies that would infringe on our God-given rights; it has done so many times. Praying and getting involved in the political process do make a difference. These are our duties as good Catholics and good citizens, which we should perform out of love for God, our neighbor, and our country both in good times and in bad. The fact that our nation today is a shell of its former self makes it more imperative, not less imperative, that we its citizens daily unite in offering our prayers, sacrifices, words and actions in service to our country to help restore its former greatness. As long as we continue to do that, there is hope for our nation’s future.

Someone once wrote that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Today our liberties are under attack as never before by an unholy alliance between Big Government and Big Business, driven and justified by the anti-God and inhuman ideologies of radical secularism and insatiable materialism. We must remain vigiliant in defending our inalienable God-given rights and liberties--including the right to life of innocent unborn children, our right to pray and worship God publicly, and our right to safe and healthy food--against the attacks of these twin enemies of the American people, and we must not rest until those rights and liberties threatened and denied us are fully restored and protected.

Let freedom ring!

Copyright © 2014 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

Article Heritage Series #3: Revisiting the Twenty-Second Amendment

It's time for another installment of the quarterly (or so) "Article Heritage" Series here on my blog, which features selections from my early days as a writer. This time I present an article I wrote back in late 2007 entitled, "Revisiting the Twenty-Second Amendment." On one level, this essay was driven by my nostalgia for the fact that the Bush administration would soon be ending, and by my apprehension that our country would be governed by a worse president once Bush left office. (Turned out to be true.) But on a deeper level, the prospect of the end of a presidential administration led me to reflect on the whole concept of legal term limits for American public office and whether such constitutionally imposed term limits are necessary, desireable, or even beneficial for the good functioning of our federal government.

Our nation's Founders counseled against setting term limits on any public office, arguing that it should be left up to the voters to decide whether a given public official should be re-elected for another term. If an official has served well and won the people's approval, so goes the argument, they will naturally re-elect him; if, on the other hand, he has served badly and won public disapproval, he will be voted out of office. Also, eschewing term limits leaves public officials free to decide whether to run for another term or not. For almost 150 years, following the example of George Washington, U.S. presidents voluntarily restricted themselves to a maximum of two terms in office. There was nothing wrong with that; on the contrary, this praiseworthy practice reflected the character and nobility of our nation's earlier leaders, who were selfless public servants rather than opportunistic politicians. Leaders were free to decide whether to run for another term or not, and the people were free to decide whether to re-elect them or not. The thinking was that term limits should be voluntary, not imposed by law. The Founders' rejection of constitutionally mandated term limits was thus a sign of their respect for the freedom of both leaders and people.

I have taken the Founders' position on this matter in this article. I contend that the Twenty-Second Amendment to our Constitution, adopted in the early 1950s following the lengthy administration of FDR, should be repealed. Supporters of term limits on federal public offices claim that such limits provide a healthy and necessary check on corruption, careerism, and excessive centralization of power in the hands of a few leaders. However, the two-term limit imposed on the presidency by the Twenty-Second Amendment has not resulted in a less corrupt presidency since the days of FDR; on the contrary, we are now living under the most corrupt president in American history. Legally imposed term limits simply force corrupt and unscrupulous leaders to confine their corruption to a shorter time period, while preventing the voters from re-electing a good leader who deserves more than two terms. Moreover, power-hungry tyrants never allow legally imposed term limits to thwart their ambitions; they simply abrogate them, changing the laws to suit their agenda.

In other words, legally imposed term limits can never guarantee honest, responsible, and limited government. Only honest and responsible leaders of good moral and religious character can provide that. The core issue here is personal responsibility vs. legal and political structures. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in his encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), man is always free and must always make his decisions anew; therefore, good structures alone cannot guarantee good government. That depends on the personal character of those who govern. Many Tea Party activists are attempting to compensate for the increasing corruption of our federal government by legally restricting the number of terms senators and representatives may serve. By so doing, they are applying a political and legal solution to a moral and personal problem. A government is only as good as the people who run it. As long as we have corrupt, irresponsible, and tyrannical leaders, we will have corrupt, irresponsible, and tyrannical government regardless of what the Constitution says or of what term limits may be on the books. The Tea Party activists who favor imposing new term limits on Congress should listen to the wisdom of the Founders in this regard and attack the problem of corruption at its root by focusing on personal responsibility rather than espousing a top-down solution that won't fix the problem and will further restrict the liberties of the American people.

Okay, enough said--here's the article.

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REVISITING THE TWENTY-SECOND AMENDMENT: A THIRD TERM FOR PRESIDENT BUSH

by Justin Soutar
December 21, 2007

I am not particularly a fan of President Bush. As an American Catholic, I certainly applaud our president’s sustained defense of the right to life of all innocent human beings from conception to natural death, and I generally approve of the measures he has taken to help eradicate the curses of abortion, embryonic stem-cell research involving abortion, and euthanasia in the United States and around the world. President Bush’s continued defense of traditional marriage against the enormous pressure of a few misguided social activists is similarly refreshing. I have been proud to hear this president mention God in his speeches without fear of retaliation by anti-Christian groups such as the ACLU. Moreover, I also generally approve of the USA PATRIOT Act, a comprehensive piece of legislation which he signed in 2001 to facilitate governmental action against terrorism. I have steadily supported the war in Afghanistan from 2001 until 2007. Bush’s appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court met with my satisfaction. In addition, I was pleased with Bush for signing the Broadcast Decency Bill into law in 2006, which raised by ten times the FCC fine for instances of indecent pictures and language in the media. Finally, I agree with the president’s principles on taxes, affirmative action, and gun ownership.

However, beyond these important areas I have tended to disagree strongly with President Bush’s policies. I find myself at odds with our current chief executive over federal spending levels, global laissez-faire economics (so-called “free” trade), energy policy, Social Security, the minimum wage, immigration policy, certain sections of the PATRIOT Act, the “War on Terrorism,” the Iraq war, torture of prisoners, America’s nuclear weapons program, our relationship with the UN, foreign aid, and environmental policy.

Yet despite all of my momentous differences with President George W. Bush, for some time now I have been considering the idea that he should be able to run for a third consecutive term. Why? Why would someone who so strenuously opposes the neoconservative ideology favor granting President Bush another four years in office? Perhaps I have gone crazy? If our highest public servant has violated the Constitution and wreaked significant havoc to our country both domestically and overseas as I believe he has, why wouldn’t I be in favor of impeachment instead?

All of these good questions depend upon and point to a broader issue: Why revisit the Twenty-Second Amendment to our Constitution, which stipulates that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice”? Nearly everyone knows the reason for the passage of this amendment in 1951. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected to four consecutive terms in office stretching from the midst of the Great Depression in 1933 to the end of World War II in 1945. Many Americans felt that in this twelve-year-long tenure, a single president accumulated an undue amount of power and influence over the federal government. Indeed, the United States had distinguished itself from other nations in the late 1700s by deciding to check government power through the holding of periodic elections for all members of the legislative and executive branches of government.

Since the mid-twentieth century, Americans have generally come to understand democracy as a system in which no single public servant holds very much power for very much time. They point to the example of founders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, who voluntarily departed office after serving two terms, as evidence that no president should ever be allowed to remain in office longer than that. By and large, Americans support the Twenty-Second Amendment without question as a beneficial curtailment of executive authority and an accurate reflection of the intent of our nation’s founders that we maintain a limited government, that we be “a nation of laws and not of men.”

However, I have come to believe that this amendment, far from being beneficial and traditional, is harmful to our country and represents a serious misunderstanding of what our nation’s founders actually intended. In a series of articles which advocated ratification of the Constitution and which were printed in several New York newspapers in 1787 and 1788 entitled The Federalist Papers, founding father Alexander Hamilton argued convincingly against setting any sort of term limit on the “office of the chief magistrate” (the presidency). In this argument, which is several thousands words long, Hamilton offers five distinct reasons to support his position. We will review this rationale briefly and then focus mainly on the one overarching reason I find most compelling. The Federalist No. 72 (ed. Garry Wills, Bantam Books, New York, 1982, pp. 367-370) reads as follows:

Nothing appears more plausible upon first sight, nor more ill founded upon close inspection, than a scheme, which in relation to the present point has had some respectable advances—I mean that of continuing the chief magistrate in office for a certain time, and then excluding him from it, either for a limited period, or for ever after….

One ill effect of the exclusion would be diminution of the inducements to good behavior. There are few men who would not feel much less zeal in the discharge of a duty, when they were conscious that the advantages of the station, with which it was connected, must be relinquished at a determinate period, than when they were permitting to entertain a hope of obtaining by meriting a continuance of them….

Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government, to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to be raised to the seat of the supreme magistracy, wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?....

A fourth ill effect of the exclusion would be the banishing men from stations, in which in certain emergencies of the state their presence might be of the greatest moment to the public interest or safety. There is no nation which has not at one period or another experienced an absolute necessity of the services of particular men, in particular situations…How unwise therefore must be every such self-denying ordinance, as serves to prohibit a nation from making use of its own citizens, in the manner best suited to its exigencies and circumstances!....

A fifth ill effect of the exclusion would be, that it would operate as a constitutional interdiction of stability in the administration. By necessitating a change of men, in the first office in the nation, it would necessitate a mutability of measures…And we need not be apprehensive there will be too much stability, while there is even the option of changing; nor need we desire to prohibit the people from continuing their confidence, where they think it may be safely placed, and where by constancy on their part they may obviate the fatal inconveniences of fluctuating councils and a variable policy….

There is an excess of refinement in the idea of disabling the people to continue in office men, who had entitled themselves, in their opinion, to approbation and confidence…

Often our perception of what our nation’s founders intended is distorted by our own contemporary ways of thinking. Hence the importance of returning to the actual writings which those esteemed men have left us. The text above may be somewhat difficult reading for a twenty-first-century American, but even the casual reader can tell that Hamilton was definitely not in favor of a term-limited presidency.

The first reason Hamilton gives is based on the principle of positive incentive. When a person knows that he will be forced to leave office within eight years whether the people approve of him or not, he will tend to not care so much about performing his job well. On the other hand, if a president’s continuance in office depends entirely on popular satisfaction with his administration, he will be motivated to fulfill his duties well in order to gain and retain that satisfaction. This is the same rationale on which a free market economy exists: incentives to productivity, efficiency, quality, and frugality are built into the system. No one would suggest compelling a successful, popular and respected CEO to step down simply because he has spent a certain amount of time in the same post.

Hamilton warned that a term limit on the chief executive office of the nation would encourage unscrupulous men to take advantage of the short-lived tenure for their own personal benefit. With a two-term limit that effectively renders the president a lame duck (unaccountable to the public) for half of his administration, we would expect corrupt, unethical or immoral behavior to surface mainly during those latter four years. Unfortunately, this has proven true in the cases of Richard Nixon (Watergate in 1973), Ronald Reagan (Iran-contra scandal in 1986), Bill Clinton (Lewinsky scandal revealed in 1997), and the younger George Bush (role of Vice President Cheney’s petroleum firm Halliburton in Iraq war; the continuing New Orleans disaster; Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals in 2005; Scooter Libby indictment, Karl Rove scandals, and warrant-less wiretapping revealed in 2006). Corruption has infested the presidency with increasing vigor since the Twenty-Second Amendment came into force almost sixty years ago. Presidential approval ratings during a second term have routinely plummeted for almost every two-term president since Lyndon Johnson, as well as for many single-term presidents, usually because their concern for the good of the people became distorted or overshadowed by personal and corporate interests.

Another reason Hamilton put forward against a term limit is that our nation may desperately need the continued services of one particular executive during a time of war or other national crisis. The long presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt was a fruit of such circumstances; Americans chose to reelect him three times because they were passing though the wrenching experiences of economic depression and world war. Voters intuitively understand that the nation needs continuous leadership during such a challenging period. For this reason, every American president who served during an officially declared war was reelected. The people should not be barred from keeping in office for upwards of eight years a single individual whom they believe will guide their country safely though a difficult time.

The final reason Hamilton advances against “exclusion” is that a term limit harms the stability of the nation by ordering a change in presidents after every few years. A president who knows that he will be in office for no more than eight years will not be too inclined to pursue policies that require more than a decade to develop, or that will benefit the nation twenty or thirty years from now, as he knows that the next president can soon undo whatever he tries to accomplish. This compulsory turnover of chief executives, Hamilton observed, would result in “fluctuating councils and a variable policy,” which he terms “fatal inconveniences” to the country. There is no doubt that occasionally a particular president might pursue some detrimental measures which need to be corrected by a future president. But Hamilton was not discussing that; rather, he was warning of the threat to American stability posed by recurrent, massive, radical paradigm shifts in government policy in general, such as from isolationism to interventionism, from overregulation to laissez-faire economics, from a weak central government to a federal police state, and from insufficient national defense to large and permanent standing armies. Continuity should be the norm, while change should be the exception. The Twenty-Second Amendment represents a rejection of this wise counsel.

I confess that I am totally enamored of Hamilton’s logic concerning this issue. Yet for me the most compelling argument against term limits is implicitly present in all the reasons which Hamilton listed. It is this: The people should be free to decide whether to keep a particular president in office or to elect a new president. They should not be forced to automatically elect a new head of government either every four or eight years.

The threat of a corrupt, power-hungry demagogue, which the Twenty-Second Amendment was passed to protect us from, can be dealt with just as easily by having the people vote him out of office in the next election. Some people might remind me that Adolf Hitler was democratically elected by an unsuspecting German populace, that he legally enacted a constitutional amendment allowing himself to serve as chancellor for life, and that he became the infamous genocidal warmongering egomaniac we remember today. They might point out that with a term-limiting amendment at least we are insuring ourselves against such a dangerous dictator. However, this line of reasoning is flawed in one important respect: determined absolute dictators do not allow constitutions, amendments, or laws to stand in their way. Hitler suspended the constitution of Germany altogether and imposed martial law as soon as he wished. If the American people ever become gullible enough to elect a Hitler-like president, he would laugh at the Twenty-Second Amendment and proceed to ignore it for his own purposes. In other words, the main reason why most Americans like the amendment turns out to be completely insubstantial upon closer examination.

And while each American president can choose not to seek reelection, as our leaders for the first one hundred fifty years were accustomed to do after serving two terms, this in no way demands that such custom become the unchanging law of the land. The Twenty-Second Amendment unnecessarily restricts the freedom of both electors and the elected. Hamilton notes that any perceived benefit from a law which can expel bad presidents from office is far outweighed by the disadvantage that the same law will also force from office excellent and much needed presidents. Many Americans think that the two-term limit is among the guardians of our democracy, when in fact it is the opposite—it prevents the people from maintaining in office a wise and capable president whom they admire and trust.

It is remarkable how all the “ill effects” of a term limit on the presidency have manifested themselves just as Hamilton predicted more than two centuries ago: instability, insecurity, and corruption. The latter deserves a little more attention.

Evidently, the CEOs of mega-corporations love the current presidential system because it gives them enormous opportunity for profit and allows them to routinely select new presidential candidates who will further their own narrow selfish interests. The cost of bribing even several dozen candidates is trivial compared with the financial rewards to be reaped when one of those candidates reaches the highest office in the land. Under pretext of national security, or free-market economics, or freedom and democracy, or some combination of these excuses, the president allows the mega-corporations a broader sphere of influence and then, by the time the people figure out what has happened, he is a lame duck anyway. The Clinton and Bush administrations have been excellent examples of this corporate corruption of the presidency. The abortion industry thrived under the care of President Bill Clinton, and it’s no coincidence that he and Wal-Mart both came from Arkansas. Under President Bush we have witnessed a war in Iraq for the defense manufacturers and oil tycoons, low foreign trade barriers and amnesty for illegal immigrants for all the transnational corporations, neglect of New Orleans levees and Minnesota bridges, inattention to the Sudanese genocide, the birth of a new nuclear weaponry program (Complex 2030), compulsory voting machines with deliberate design flaws—the list goes on and on.

So now that I have explained the disadvantages of the Twenty-Second Amendment to our Constitution in general, I turn to the question of why I favor permitting President Bush to run for a third term in particular. Several factors have combined to lead me to adopt this opinion.

For one thing, this president is sincere. In stark contrast to President Bill Clinton, a habitual TV liar who knew he was deceiving, President Bush believes what he says whether it is true or not. This sincerity remains refreshing for me despite all of the damage Bush has done. I would rather have a sincere president who knows what he believes than an insincere president who deliberately deceives the public.

A second major factor in my opinion is the sorry state of the 2008 presidential campaign. The high-profile candidates being fawned upon by the corporate-owned media range from mediocre to appalling at a time when the need for a truly great president has never been more painfully felt.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has flip-flopped on the issue of abortion and plans to increase American defense spending above already ridiculous levels. The dangerous, power-hungry former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani adamantly supports the unrestricted legalization of abortion and sodomy and would have no qualms about starting a nuclear war in the Middle East. Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson is a practiced lobbyist and wealthy trial lawyer who opposes everything I stand for. California Representative Duncan Hunter and Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo do not represent me on most of the issues either. Texas Representative Ron Paul would make a truly great president, but it is highly unlikely he will win the Republican nomination. Arizona Senator John McCain and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee hold praiseworthy moral values, but the odds are against both men. On the Democratic side, all of the candidates support abortion, and the currently leading contender—-New York Senator Hillary Clinton—-makes me sick to my stomach.

On the other hand, when compared with any one of the Republican or Democratic hopefuls, I find President Bush to be the lesser of two evils. No, Bush may not be the “truly great” leader America desperately needs at this time. But I believe that having George Bush continue in office would be far superior to having Hillary Clinton, or John Edwards, or Barack Obama, or Dennis Kucinich, or Mitt Romney, or Rudy Giuliani, or Fred Thompson take over the presidency and make an even bigger mess of it.

Thank goodness Mrs. Clinton cannot muster much more than a 30 percent public approval rating despite glossy coverage in the media. Of course, this highlights the point that moving from President Bush to President Hillary Clinton would be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. As much as Americans are disenchanted with President George Bush, I believe that they are even less enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton. In fact, the approval ratings of presidential candidate Mrs. Clinton and the incumbent President Bush in late 2007 were statistically tied at 30 percent.

Of course this startling result is a reflection of America’s disapproval of Bush and its disconnection from Hillary, but it also should give pause to those who claim that Bush is finished. Isn’t it remarkable that, after seven long years of Bush administration, an experienced, first-ever female candidate from the opposite political party with money to burn and media attention that won’t quit cannot rank any better than the incumbent in the public mind? If a presidential contest between Bush and Mrs. Clinton were held at the time of these poll results, a third Bush victory would have been a distinct possibility. So a third factor in my belief that George Bush should be eligible to run for a third term is that, contrary to general perception, he actually would be a viable repeat candidate.

Finally, my last significant reason for advocating a third Bush run is to comfort the president and to give him a third chance. In recent years, I have become dismayed and disturbed to witness such a flood of vile, rude, offensive and obscene personal attacks unleashed against President Bush. It’s one thing to disagree with and even to firmly oppose various domestic and foreign policies of an administration; it’s another to throw hateful insults and pointless abuse. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be the most attacked, ridiculed, disparaged, and insulted president in American history, not just in America but around the world. Certainly President Bush has been responsible for numerous illegal actions that provide ample grounds for impeachment, as his critics declare. Yet I do not favor impeachment because President Bush has a good heart and he has accomplished the commendable things I mentioned at the beginning of this article. The next president may very well bring neither a good heart nor good actions. By proposing to allow George Bush another campaign, I am making a little statement that I am appalled at the deterioration of our public discourse; that I desire to retain a leader who is committed to the pro-life philosophy; and that I wish the president well.

Realistically, I do not expect the Twenty-Second Amendment to our Constitution to be repealed anytime soon. Nevertheless, it is interesting and healthy to ponder the hypothetical possibility of a third Bush term, just as it is instructive to discuss the merits and demerits of a term-limited presidency in general. I believe that in this chaotic and uncertain period of our nation’s history which began with the 9/11 attacks, the need for a chief executive office unrestrained by term limits is greater than when Alexander Hamilton espoused it at the dawn of our history. A term-unlimited presidency would be a better, more accountable, more responsive and more democratic institution for the United States.

Copyright © 2007 by Justin Soutar. All rights reserved.

Quote of the Day

"To give oneself completely to God is to find the path of true freedom."

--Benedict XVI

Forty-Plus Years of Legal Mass Murder

Today we Americans observe with great sorrow the forty-first anniversary of the unconstitutional, unjust, and tragic Roe v. Wade decision.

On January 22, 1973, seven men on the U.S. Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that a woman has a right to kill her innocent unborn child for any reason whatsoever. In producing this ruling, the Court misinterpreted the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution, which states, “No person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This passage, along with most of the Fifth Amendment, was written to protect the rights of persons accused of crimes. When our nation’s Founders authored this text, they meant that no one could be executed or deprived of his freedom or land without first being properly tried and convicted of a crime. But the irresponsible activist Court led by Chief Justice Warren Burger chose to ignore the intent of the Constitution’s authors and, through some incomprehensible twist of logic, arbitrarily reinterpreted the Fifth Amendment due process clause to justify legalizing the murder of innocent unborn persons—something the Founders would never have approved of in their wildest dreams. Roe v. Wade represented nothing less than an attack on the integrity and meaning of the Constitution of the United States by the very institution that is supposed to protect it, the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not only was Roe v. Wade an unconstitutional decision, it was also an unjust decision. In the Declaration of Independence, we the people of the United States declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The right to life is the most fundamental of all rights with which God the Creator has endowed all human beings. This right to life is an “unalienable” right, meaning that it cannot be taken away. Human life is sacred because it is a gift from God the Creator. To deprive an innocent human being of life is a violation of that person’s unalienable right to life. It is also a violation of the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Our nation’s devout Christian Founders took these principles of the natural law for granted. They could scarcely have imagined that, two hundred years later, the judicial branch of government would somehow justify allowing innocent human beings to be killed in their mothers’ wombs right here in the United States of America. They did warn, however, that the United States would not long endure without what George Washington referred to as the “indispensable supports” of religion and morality. If the people of a nation don’t believe that human rights—especially the right to life—come from God, then those rights will be perceived as coming from the state and the state will claim the authority to give or take away those rights as it sees fit. And if people don’t believe that it is wrong to deprive an innocent person of his or her right to life, then human life will not be respected.

Finally, Roe v. Wade was an immensely tragic decision. During the past forty-plus years, some 56.5 million innocent unborn human beings—an average of 1.38 million a year—have been murdered in their mothers’ wombs through legalized abortion. That is an alarming and staggering figure. That’s more than nine times the number of innocent Jews murdered in the Holocaust. It’s also more than the fifty million people killed in World War II, the deadliest conflict in modern human history. It is difficult to comprehend the full magnitude of this loss of life or to calculate the full impact of this massacre of the unborn on our nation over the past forty years. Excluding miscarriages, accidents, disease, and other causes of death outside the womb, our country is currently missing some 56 million inhabitants; in addition, many of those aborted in the 1970s and 80s would now be married and raising children of their own, so our country is really missing somewhere around 70 million people, and our nation’s population should be around 388 million instead of the 318 million it is now. Think of how much different—and better—things would be in our country if we had all these missing people contributing to our economy and using their God-given talents to serve our nation in a variety of professions and fields. We will never know how different the United States would be in 2014 if nearly all the innocent unborn had been born and were alive today. The absence of 70 million citizens is an incalculable loss to our nation.

Blessed John Paul II once said, “The condition for the survival of America is to respect every human person, especially the weakest and most defenseless ones, those as yet unborn.” The appalling legal mass murder of the unborn in our nation must be brought to an end. Roe v. Wade must be overturned so that the unalienable, God-given right to life of every innocent unborn human being in the United States is once again protected by our Constitution and guaranteed by our laws. We must not rest until we achieve that goal.