FAREWELL TO FREEDOM

[M]

FAREWELL TO FREEDOM

 

Roger Sherman (1721-1793) was the only Founding Father who signed all four of our nation’s major founding documents:

 

The Articles of Association in 1774.

The Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The Articles of Confederation in 1777. 

The Constitution of the United States in 1787.

 

Sherman was part of the committee that drafted The Declaration of Independence.

 

As a delegate to the Continental Congress, he gave 138 speeches at that gathering. 

 

Shoe cobbler, merchant, surveyor, self-taught lawyer, superior court judge, state senator, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Senator, Sherman was a man of broad experience and expertise.  

 

It was Sherman who seconded Benjamin Franklin’s motion to open each day’s deliberations with prayer.

 

It was Sherman who proposed the historic “Connecticut Compromise” that state representation in the U.S. Congress be equal in the Senate and state representation in the House be based on population---thus breaking through one of the Convention’s most bitter points of debate, disagreement, and deadlock.

 

It was Sherman who worked successfully with George Washington to officially declare a national Day of Thanksgiving.  He cited many such days in Scripture where such occasions and observances were held to give thanks to the Almighty for His favor and blessing. 

 

He declared those ancient celebrations to be “worthy of Christian imitation” in our own land.

 

In 1776, Sherman, John Adams, and George Wythe of Virginia were the men who crafted the instructions for the members of the United States Embassy in Canada.

 

Those instructions read:

 

“You are to declare that we hold sacred the rights of conscience.  You may promise to the whole people, solemnly in our name, the free and undisturbed exercise of their religion.”

 

Such undisturbed and unrestricted freedom of conscience and free exercise of our religious faith is also promised and guaranteed to all Americans in the First Amendment to our Constitution.

 

But outrageously, a series of Supreme Court rulings in the early 60’s has stripped us of those promises, cancelled those guarantees, and crushed the religious freedoms Americans enjoyed for almost two centuries up to those radical rulings.  

 

Public expressions of our faith are now outlawed, forbidden, harassed and punished on every hand. 

 

I ask:

 

By what right does that High Court deprive us of our rights?

 

I challenge:

 

By what right does the radical rendering of the Constitution in the early 60’s deny to us the very rights the Constitution sovereignly preserved and protected throughout its venerable history up to that time?

 

To whatever extent possible, I defy:

 

The unlawful rulings of unelected judges, unaccountable to anyone but themselves, who issued those rulings in defiance of all past legal precedent and against the unanimous, contrary rulings of three lower courts on the same issue.

 

If an atheistic conqueror had seized power in America and instantly forbid all public expressions of any kind of religious faith, he could not have done more violence to our Constitution than those members of own Supreme Court did. 

 

What’s worse, the American people today are rapidly losing any firm conviction about the critical importance of religious faith for us as individuals and as a nation.

 

Just five years ago, 69-percent of the American people strongly agreed with this statement:

 

“True religious freedom means all citizens must have freedom of conscience to believe and practice the core commitments and values of their faith.”

 

Today, that number has fallen to 55 percent---a 14 point drop.

 

The same poll showed that even Protestant clergy are “significantly less concerned” today about the importance of defending religious freedom.

 

A fatal mistake. 

 

Religious freedom has been rightly called “the first freedom.”

 

If government can dictate what we may or may not believe and practice---or what we must believe and practice, regardless of our conscience or our religion---we are no longer a free people.

 

We Americans are already living under what, in my view, has been rightly called a “soft tyranny.”

 

But mark my words, that tyranny is rapidly hardening by media manipulation and by official coercion requiring us to say, do, think, and act as “they” command---or else to withdraw into craven silence. 

 

The fact is, no part of our government has any rightful role whatsoever in what we believe and practice religiously.  All laws, rules, regulations, and ordinances that infringe on that freedom are, on their face, invalid.  Every one of them should be renounced, rescinded, and repealed. 

 

But today’s true danger to religious freedom is not just the government.

 

The danger now is that significant segments of the American population have grown hostile to religion---especially to Christianity. 

 

That’s because the Christian faith stands squarely opposed to the sexual rebellion of the 60’s against Biblical standards for human sexuality.

 

That rebellion is now the new secular dogma about sex.  

 

Anything that opposes that dogma is branded as a social evil.  

 

White is now black. 

 

To stand for chastity before marriage and fidelity within marriage is the new heresy.  Those who take that stand are viciously burned in the fires of public ridicule and rejection. 

 

Any religion that has such standards is seen by many as something to be marginalized, demonized, and discarded.

 

Fewer and fewer seem willing to stand against this muddy tide.

 

That’s the way it is in America today.

 

But with God’s intervention, called down by the penitent prayers of His humbled people, it does not have to be this way or go this way. 

 

God’s ways have always been the best ways.

 

Sooner or later, we pray, America will compare and contrast today’s sinful ways with God’s righteous ways---and, as a matter of common sense, choose the right way.

 

As God has said to men and nations throughout the ages:

 

 “Why choose death?  Choose life!”

 

---Don Clark

[M]

We must remember it was Democrat appointed Progressive/Liberal Justices, starting with the Warren Court, who overturned the majority of what we had for multiple decades held to be true and proper conduct, commensurate with the Freedoms and Responsibilities the Founders gave us, within the written boundaries of the U.S. Constitution. 

[kevin kiernan]

Roger Stone`s family has a gag order. How can that be allowed for a judge to put gag order on his daughter who is not involved in the case....YOU WANT TO TALK  TOTALITARIANISM....WOW THINGS ARE GETTING DANGEROUS.