America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedom, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln
I am a collector of quotations. I suspect pithy observations of reality have been around since language began, long before the written word to record them.
We have transitioned from our ancient aural roots to a visual reality where the written word is often embellished with pictures and memes. A friend observed that we think in pictures. We often use the metaphor, “picture this.” And now we seem to be on the cusp of transitioning to a virtual reality shaped by AI.
Memes have become popular by utilizing clever combinations of pictures and words. Interestingly, Paleolithic man used pictures long before there was writing. In the 1960s, my parents took me to Europe and memorably we toured the 20,000-year-old cave art in Lascaux, France.
I often use quotes as headers for this column. Like the titles of my essays, I shamelessly use both as “hooks” to entice readers and to serve as a clue for the essay’s direction.
Recently, I used John Adams’ quote about The Constitution, religion and morality, which deserves repeating, “Our Constitution was made only for a religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Polaris is the North Star, which has guided mariners for centuries. In my column of June 8, entitled “North Stars,” I proclaimed that the Bible is the guide for my ship on the sea of life, supplemented by the guiding principles of the Constitution.
Apparently, the chief writer of the Constitution, James Madison, imagined the same hierarchy: “The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded.” And George Washington, the father of our country, held that, “It is impossible to govern the world without God.”
I am a Christian, and in my small way, I strive to be an evangelist for the Gospel in my columns. However, how you live is more important. Jesus said, “Let your light shine before men so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16).
I am less fundamentalist than some, but I agree with John Adams that “The Bible contains the most profound philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy that ever was conceived on earth.”
We should be careful of judging people outside of the times in which they lived. Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant but complicated man. As the chief writer of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson penned the noble ideals of Enlightenment thought. However, he was also a lifelong slaveholder. And perhaps because of his dislike of Alexander Hamilton and his opposition to George Washington and John Adams’ Federalism, Jefferson began what we now see as our current poisonous political parties. Jefferson even rewrote the Gospels, omitting the miracles of Jesus while extolling The Master: “The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend to the happiness of man… Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they come from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian.”
Thomas Jefferson and John Jay assisted James Madison in drafting the Constitution. However, it would not become the law of the land until 9 of the 13 original states accepted (ratified) the document. Madison, Hamilton and Jay wrote “The Federalist Papers” under the pseudonym “Publius” to educate Americans and to promote passage of the Constitution, accomplished a year later in 1788.
One of the big issues for ratification was the absence of a Bill of Rights. George Mason of Virginia championed this cause, which was accomplished with the passage of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Our Bill of Rights was patterned after the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the latter written by George Mason.
These fundamental rights are integral to Americanism, but I want to focus on the first two rights within the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” We hear much about the “establishment clause,” but liberals and progressives seem unaware of the rest of the sentence, which restricts the government from “prohibiting the free exercise of religion.”
When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1800, he wrote a letter to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, assuring them that the new government was not going to establish a state religion as existed in England. Confusion arose in 1947 when liberal Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black revived a previously obscure metaphor from Jefferson’s letter. In the letter to the Baptists, Jefferson quoted the First Amendment and used the metaphor of “building a wall of separation between Church and State.” That phrase is not in the Constitution nor any original documents, but has subsequently been used as an anti-religious cudgel.
Obama called the Constitution a “set of negative liberties.” This is one instance that I’ll agree with him. The Tenth Amendment states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This means that any powers not explicitly granted to the federal government are retained by the states or the people. Progressive socialist Democrats are either too stupid to understand this or would rather just lie about the wording.
June 14 was Flag Day, President Trump’s birthday and the announcement that all sides have agreed to end the Iranian war and open the Straits of Hormuz. We are told that the enriched uranium dust under the buried rubble of Fordow will be recovered and removed. I have hope that the peace deal will be signed and the factions within Iran will keep the deal. We’ll see.
If this happens, the winners will be America, the world and President Trump. But there will also be losers: the fanatical Iranian leadership, their terrorist proxies and progressive socialist Democrats.
America has seen 250 years of perseverance and winning. I’m still not tired of it.
