The following is the text from the speech that I gave this past weekend. The focus was on the basis for the societal political divide – a divide that has widened as a result of a fundamental difference that runs far deeper than a notion of left or right – liberal or conservative.
Tonight, we gather united not behind a conservative cause, but around an American cause. We long for a reinvigoration of liberty, for a renewal of federalism, and for a change of course that shuns the false prophets of collectivism and recalls the truth and unbridled success of individual freedom. Yet, we recognize that it was individual freedom itself that has taken the American cause off course; however, we know that it is a reinvestment in the individual that will ignite us again.
Since the beginning, we have pledged allegiance to our American flag and to the nation that stands for liberty and justice for all. The framework of that liberty and justice was captured in our founding documents and in the spirit of our shared Judeo-Christian values. Our sense of justice and the basis for our rights is founded in that shared system of values. For without the underpinnings of a common morality and sense of justice, our documents are worth less than the paper on which they were drafted. The documents were written merely as a reflection of that which our Founders knew to be true – a truth that governs our lives well beyond the reach of those documents.
In our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the basis for our ability to declare independence was in the assumption of the rights to which we are entitled by nature and nature’s God. Further, he wrote that the specific rights we sought were those made self-evident to us by our Creator. From that point through the penning of our Constitution, our founding was based in natural truth – a truth greater than any of us or any group of us. Our documents codified the truth that was held and lived out by a vast majority of society, a moral society from which a respect of the Truth was natural.
In 1798, John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Militia reminding them of this fragile, yet powerful fact, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
“It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Since Adam and Eve, we have seen countless examples throughout history where the ills Adams referenced were destructive to individuals, to the balance of power, and to the struggle between good and evil. In America, however, where the minority opinion is heard while the majority rules, we have seen a slow erosion in this truthful underpinning. The destructive forces take time to work in our system, but for the last 80 years we have now seen them steadily advance to the precipice of destroying both liberty and justice.
Our scales of justice have been balanced by a firm reliance on the Judeo-Christian truth of the Ten Commandments, and if not all of them, at least those Commandments where societal norms are established. We acknowledged the truth that there are such concepts as a right and a wrong – that there are clear lines between good and evil. This principle cannot be stressed enough, the acknowledgment of this very truth …. as truth is what made our founding so unique, so powerful, and so prosperous. We acknowledged the source of our rights to be something other than a king, a piece of paper, or any one person’s economic theory. As such, we adopted our Creator’s norms as the basis for our law.
Though we acknowledged this truth at our founding, the last 80 years have chipped away at the foundation so much so that nearly 53% of the voting populace selected Barak Obama to be the standard bearer for the version of truth in which they now believe. At our founding, we selected the moral truth to be the basis for our law; therefore, any rejection of that can be said to be immoral. We now have a President who clearly does not believe in the moral truth and as such does not adhere to the premise of our founding. He has become the poster child for this thriving immoral cancerous tumor on our society. It is a tumor that has been growing for some time, but the pace of its growth has now exponentially increased thanks to his deceit.
Unlike the arguments of our President, there are examples to back up this rhetoric.
One of the fundamental roles for government in the law is to protect private property rights. The right to private property is one of the most critical rights for fostering our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The right to private property is not new – it is derived straight from the Ten Commandments – the natural law that we acknowledge. Exodus 20:15 says plainly, “You shall not steal.” Yet, it goes further in verse 17, which commands us, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”
This is fundamental – you have no right to anything that belongs to another person – it is his to keep just as he should not covet that which is yours.
In psychology the word ‘covet’ means an inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one deserves, especially with respect to material wealth. A synonym for covet is jealousy, as in the resentful desire for the advantages of others.
So here we have it in very plain language, do not steal things from others, and so you are not tempted don’t even covet that which is not yours.
I’d guess that if I read those last 100 words to people, that 99 out of 100 would agree with them, yet that is not how our society is playing out – actions of our fellow citizens are speaking louder than these words.
In Barak Obama’s America, it is perfectly okay to, as he said, “spread the wealth around.” It is encouraged to play class warfare, it is encouraged to take from the private sector, it is encouraged to steepen the ladder of progressive taxation, it is encouraged to confiscate property through special taxation crafted for certain groups, it is encouraged to create entitlements that reallocate property from one group to the next, and it is encouraged to spend recklessly to the point of stealing from future generations to fund the excesses of the current.
All of these violate our known basic, fundamental truth that is encapsulated in the spirit of our founding and in the moral imperative thereof. The cancerous tumor of immorality expands every time he opens his mouth or moves his pen.
Unfortunately, this tumor cannot be excised by a removal of this new growth; Obama is merely a symptom of the root cancer cells that have permeated our society. We have far too many citizens who have decided that it is perfectly plausible to send representatives to Washington with the directive of enacting laws and practices that appease their jealousy, their covetous disposition. These are citizens who now believe that it is easier to build one’s house through the enticement of the legislature rather than through one’s hard work and economic merit.
If this behavior is not stealing, I don’t know what is. Any way that one cuts it, this behavior and thinking is wrong and immoral. This immorality is a cancer that is akin to the metaphoric whale that Adams warned would go right through the net of the Constitution; it is a cancer that is killing us. It is perverting the incentive or prohibiting people from pursing happiness, which causes all boats to rise with the successes of the individual – our nation is empirical proof of that very fact.
Americans are the most generous people in the history of the world because we seek to treat our neighbors as we would treat ourselves. We understand that the equality of man that was written into our Constitution was not the equality of outcome, but the equality of opportunity and the equality in the brotherly sense, the sense that we are all part of the same family. However, it is when people alter this definition of equality to encompass the fantasy of equal outcomes that we again sprint into the land of immorality. If left to our own generosity as part of the acknowledgment of truth, we would have a very different society.
A second example of where our current president has gone off of the rails of morality concerns his view of the Constitution. As previously discussed, the Constitution is based upon the acknowledgment of eternal truths; not from the theories of Karl Marx or even Adam Smith. Our Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights, is a list of prohibitions – a list of things that the GOVERNMENT cannot do to its citizens. This document defines and acknowledges the freedom of the individual to take full advantage of the unalienable rights endowed unto us by our Creator.
The construction of our Constitution stands in sharp contrast to those of the former Soviet Union and to China. The Soviet constitution was comprised of an infinitely long list of that which one was forbidden to do; in China, it is the other way around. In neither case is the government restricted so as to allow the individual to pursue the truth.
However, in an interview a few years back, Obama lamented that the Warren Court did not go far enough when it failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.” Instead the judges held that the Constitution was, “a charter of negative liberties” — one that says only what government “can’t do to you.” For Obama, the pursuit of equality of outcome demands that the Constitution outline what government “must do on your behalf.”
If we acknowledge that the Constitution was drafted based upon a moral truth, it follows that any redrafting of the document that requires a 180-degree turn away from the original intent would put it clear in the land of immorality, where immorality is defined as the repudiation of the truth.
Sadly, Obama is not alone in fostering the growth of cancer in Washington. He is not the only politician who has been sent to Washington by a perverse constituency that has succumbed to tales of the false prophets. The vast majority of those in Washington today seek to use the tools of government over the individual to solve problems. They seek to appease, to one level or another, the clamor of a society covetous of the advantages achieved by those who have realized economic or meritorious success.
Our Founders imagined a world in which, as John Jay wrote in Federalist #3, “once an efficient national government is established, the best men in the country will not only consent to serve, but will also be generally appointed to manage it.” If what we have in Washington today is our best, we ought to leave this room right now. Further, John Adams clarified the qualities of a good representative in a letter to his son in which he wrote, “Integrity should be preserved in all events, as essential to his happiness, through every stage of his existence. His first order to do this he must make it a rule never to become dependent on public employments for subsistence. Let him have a trade, a profession, a farm, a shop, something where he can honestly live, and then he may engage in public affairs, if invited, upon independent principles.”
The founders clearly did not have in mind the likes of Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer. In the spring of 2008 when the oil debate was raging on, Senator Schumer went before the people of New York to falsely blame Wall Street for the rising price of oil. I used this opportunity to send a note to him with the following conclusion, “It is not your job, Senator, to propagate lies and excite the country over the package of baseless garbage that you spewed yesterday. The American people, now more than ever, need less government intervention in their lives, not more. You advocate “solutions” that will merely create problems of a greater scale than those we have today. We need elected officials who do not act to buy votes and spread lies. True cooperation and true patriotism in this case would be to all agree to the truth of simple, free market economics and allow the market to work. If all of our elected officials presented a unified message of truth and facts to the American public and got the government out of the way of the free market, the market and America’s people will respond in a way unimagined by government elites. I could go on for hours on this simple topic that you have chosen to confuse beyond belief. Spreading lies and blaming parties not at fault to buy votes is a shallow game that attempts to play off on some perceived ignorance of American citizens. I was embarrassed yesterday to call New York home, and I shall continue to be embarrassed as long as you continue to lie to the American public and stand in the way of true solutions.”
In early 2009, we had 30-year Senator Chris Dodd railing against Wall Street – a topic and industry about which he has zero practical knowledge. In John Adam’s definition of a qualified representative, Dodd’s resume would include actual experience in the industry over which he has been granted abusive powers. Instead, Dodd’s qualifications to be the chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs include an undergraduate degree in English from Providence College, two years of service in the Peace Corps where he was a volunteer in a rural village in the Dominican Republic, a law degree from the University of Louisville which he earned in 1972, three years of practicing law, five years as a member of the US House, and then 30 years in the US Senate.
The final example of this sort of leadership comes from Jimmy Walker – former Mayor of New York, who during the 1920s handed out the favors of Tammany Hall to his friends and cronies. In one of his more egregious favors, he appointed a renowned mental midget as judge of the juvenile court in Brooklyn. When confronted about the appointment, Mayor Walker said, “The appointment of Judge Hylan means the children can now be tried by their peer.”
Unfortunately, this is the way we are moving in the public intercourse, the captains of immorality are now being sent to Washington to represent their teams of immoral players back home. Too many citizens have found out that it is easier to vote themselves a check stolen from a fellow citizen than it is to earn it, and unfortunately, we have politicians who willingly acquiesce or stimulate this thinking as they seek not good for the country, but popularity, power, and employment for themselves.
I take heart from the fact that Rasmussen records Obama’s approval rating to have hit a new low of 41% this week. The disapproval trend suggests that the election of 2008 may have been a misleading indicator of how far the immoral cancer has advanced. There is no doubt that the makeup of Washington is reflection of a potentially terminal condition, but the shock that Obama has provided our country may have been just the radiation we needed.
The charge of our generation is the greatest our country has faced since 1776. Today, we are challenged to fight both international terrorist threats to our morality as well as to return the national focus to our founding moral premise – in the famous words that define victory in the War on Terror, we “must win the hearts and minds” of our own citizens. We must remind and convince our neighbors that there is no middle way – there is only morality or immorality – success through the preservation of the eternal truth or failure at its rejection.
Our task has two phases. First, we must change the mindset so as to eliminate future immoral advances that may come in the form of new entitlements, tax code gerrymandering, and baseless regulation. Second, we must turn to reverse the historical immoral indulgences in the form of health care, progressive taxation, Social Security, and the list goes on. If we are able to stop the advance of our societal cancer, our generation’s accomplishment will rank atop those of many; if we are able to reverse it, our sacrifice – both personal and financial – will put the accomplishment into greatest territory. Accomplishing phase one is imperative in order to keep freedom’s torch ablaze.
On the night before the Declaration of Independence was signed, John Adams wrote to his wife, “The furnace of affliction produces refinement in states as well as individuals, but to inaugurate the new regime will require a purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues, or there will be no blessings.” Thankfully, the blessings that flowed from our founding generation’s acknowledgment of Truth have propelled us to a point where we have these crossroads to navigate. A challenge that we can navigate by looking to the same inspirations our founders did.
Perhaps our greatest early leader, George Washington, concluded a letter to a Rhode Island Hebrew congregation with a prayer, a prayer that acknowledged the truth of the individual, the pursuit of happiness, and an optimistic future rooted in our Creator. Tonight, Washington’s prayer is ours as we go forth to protect the truth for ourselves and our posterity, “May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.”
