This is easily the most important Presidential election of
my lifetime. With every political cycle,
the two major political parties become more different, each wanting to take the
country in very different directions.
The biggest examples might be the ones regarding the First and Second
Amendments.
Now these differences are not some legal hairsplitting involving
some finer points of law, but basic differences of understanding as to what
kind of country we were meant to be and what kind of country we are going to
be.
The First Amendment guarantees among other things the right
to free exercise of religion. This can
only be guaranteed when the country, including the government, courts, and
schools, regards religious values as being consistent with the highest values
of the land. That is no longer the
case.
This, by the way, is proof that our country was indeed
founded as a Christian nation. You can’t
guarantee religious values if you now recognize higher values that can conflict
with that.
Being founded as a Christian nation did not mean that people
were compelled to adhere to the Christian religion, but it does mean that it was
respected and the Ten Commandments reflected the basic moral code for our nation. They were prominently displayed in schools,
courtrooms, and on government property throughout our country.
Now we are told that our nation was founded to be a secular
nation, and there are secular values that supersede all religions ones. These values are tolerance, equality,
diversity, and fairness. And these
values will be strictly imposed. Defy
them or even unintentionally break one, and you risk being sued, arrested, harassed,
shamed, fined, or fired.
The First Amendment also covers freedom of speech. Are there to be no restraints on what people
can say? I contend as I just noted that
the Founders assumed a religious foundation for our country.
After all, they had the Bible taught in all the
public schools. And it was only in 1962
that that practice was banned by the government.
They expected that Christian values like loving your
neighbor would temper people’s speech. But
many of them came to this country because they were denied the right to freely
speak in their home countries on matters of politics and religion, and they
didn’t want the government telling them what to believe or what they could or
could not say. They wanted people to be
free to express their opinions.
But isn’t teaching the Bible some kind of government indoctrination
in a certain belief system? Certainly. The problem is that every person and every
government has a belief system that guides and directs their behavior. And it is the Christian belief system that is
the guarantor of our freedoms and rights.
That would take another article to prove if you don’t agree with that
statement, but at least recognize that schools and governments have to work
under some basic belief system to function.
Where it used to be Christianity, it is now political correctness, or
secularism, with its new values of tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.
While Christianity has a commandment against lying, which,
by the way, political correctness does not, it embraces it, Christianity,
promoting freedom of conscience, was the driving force behind your freedom of
speech.
That is all now increasingly in jeopardy of being lost. The thought and speech police are everywhere
monitoring what you say and think in case you might offend somebody. Hate speech it is called.
And the Second Amendment is not just about guns. The bigger issue is whether we as a nation
want to trade our freedoms for security.
Security means that the government gains more power and control over our
lives to protect us from everything that could go wrong. Secularism gives the government the responsibility
to protect us from all manner of bad things, whether it is being shot, being
poor, or getting fat. You give up your
freedom of choice so that the government can try to minimize the risk of bad
outcomes in your life.
The large and grave responsibility of government also comes
with another huge price: money. Lots of
it. It requires a huge government work
force generously compensated, to get the best people, of course, and you trade
personal wealth for government oversight and protection. How great a deal is that?
This new responsibility also finds the government looking
for new ways to extend its protective power, new things that it can guarantee
to people, all in the interests of improving their lives. This also comes at great expense, so we have
gone from being the richest nation in the world to the most indebted nation in
the world. Some people might find ways
to dispute that, but I think if you include all the state and local debt
incurred in pursuit of this perfect society, we are easily now the poorest
nation in the world. We still have our
color TVs and cell phones, but when the share of federal government debt alone
is over $50,000 a person, we are not rich, we just owe a lot of people a lot of
money.
Where the Christian worldview gave us a moral system that
has been in existence for thousands of years, secularism is relatively new, and
it is making things up as it goes along.
Gender equality morphs into gender fluidism, where it can be chosen and
changed at will. In the attempt not to
offend, we change our methods of labeling things to create neutrality, fireman
to first responder, and slowly we even change definitions of what things
mean.
Where marriage was once the uniting of a man and woman such
that children are created and raised in a nurturing environment by the two
parents, marriage is now simply a legal connection of two people for certain
legal and social benefits. And even the
idea of being a parent has been redefined.
Another morphing of its values is globalism. Globalism sees all nations as equal. All their various cultures and religions were
found equal under diversity, tolerance, and equality, so now all nations have
the same status. This makes borders
irrelevant, because they become arbitrary.
Why would or should a country be able to prohibit anyone from entering
it who wants to? People are people.
It becomes wrong for a country even to seek its own
interests above that of the world community’s.
How can one nation justify being rich when so many others are poor? Not only is that unjust, but the mere fact
that one nation is rich while others are poor can only be due to that one
nation oppressing or exploiting the others.
Ultimately this means that the rich nations become poorer, and the poor
nations stay poor. Who gets rich? Individuals who know how the play the game by
the new rules, many of whom work in government.
But back to the election.
Everything I have said here is basically the current philosophy
of the Democratic Party. While the
Republican Party has some very serious problems of its own, those are issues
that need to be sorted out in the primaries where the Republican candidates are
chosen, not in the general election where the choices are down to basically
two.
Our political leaders have given us a system that only
realistically gives us two choices.
Voting a third party candidate may make you feel better, but it won’t
change the system and will only make the results of the election worse. That is an issue that you need to deal with
between elections, not in an election.
You thought the election was about Trump and Clinton, the
lesser of two evils perhaps. Actually it
is, but it is also quite a bit bigger than that. However, they do epitomize the choice. And the choice has never been clearer or more
significant than in this election.
Trump wants to put America first. This is what people do everyday when they put
their family first over everybody else.
It doesn’t mean that you hate everybody else. It does mean that if you try to take care of
everybody, you end up taking care of nobody.
And if you read the Constitution, especially the beginning, taking care
of its citizens first is precisely the role of government in our country.
