We would be much worse without Christianity; but we wouldn't know it.
...[T]oday's Washington is about as attentive to the Tenth Amendment as the Unitarian Church is to the Book of Revelation.
Controlling the interpretation of the Constitution is vital to the leftist agenda of expanding the federal government's power. That means keeping the federal judiciary as liberal as possible and treating the U.S. Supreme Court's liberal legacy as sacrosanct.
At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.
Altering the Constitution has become the daily business of the Federal Government which the document is supposed to guide and limit. Both Congress and the judiciary assume, and exercise, countless powers they aren't entitled to.
It's a curious fact about Americans that in their most fiercely patriotic moods they are willing to set aside their Constitution, the guarantor of their freedom, in order to prosecute war -- yet they insist that the war is for 'freedom'.
The words of Jesus, including those Jefferson and the Jesus Seminar have blue-pencilled, have a unique permanence. They don't merely survive as aphoristic wisdom; they have an authority in our hearts, even when we try to deny them. They command. We can obey or rebel. That is why Jesus is still not only loved but hated - and why those who hate him feel they have to profess to love him.
Now whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now say it means.
A Christian can believe that God 'ordained' the 'powers that be' - including political rulers and slaveholders - for purposes too deep for us to understand fully, and that while they last we must provisionally accept them; but that they were not meant to last forever.
Thus does a 'necessary evil' become an idol. Maybe we're stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?
Even if we are all doomed to live under the state, it doesn't follow that there is, or even can be, such a thing as a good state.
Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.
Not surprisingly, the federal judiciary nearly always rules in favor of the federal government. Judicial review, contrary to the assurances of its advocates, has hardly restrained Congress at all. Instead it has progressively stripped the states of their traditional powers, while allowing federal power to grow unchecked.
Liberals see the Constitution itself as 'living' and 'evolving' that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.
Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.
Loyalty to your country should never require you to lie about it.
It's I politics that men are always aggravating the hopeless tangle of their laws, obscuring the simplest principles and making a mockery of liberty.
