Freedom
Why Our Government Isn’t Protecting Us From Ebola, ISIS, and Open Borders
Is it just me, or does it seem to you that a switch has been flipped in the past few years that the US government is no longer committed to protecting us?
I’ve assumed all my life, based on American history and biblical principles, that civil governments exist to protect peoples’ God-given rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But now that Ebola has crossed our shores, ISIS is taking over city after city in Iraq and Syria, and the flood of illegals aliens is back page news but continuing to flood our nation, it appears that our leadership is abandoning its historic position as a protector.
Why are our current leaders not doing everything they can to protect us from these evils?
Three issues have really gotten my attention about the government’s failure to protect.
Illegal Immigration
Remember what a huge issue this was 6-12 months ago? Thousands of women, children, and who knows who else were pouring across the southern boundary into the United States. Among that spate of stories, we learned that the Obama administration had moved its security people away from the actual border, making it much easier for people to enter.
Instead of stopping and deporting illegals, they were changing diapers and running shelters for masses of humanity from Mexico and Central America.
Now months later, many towns and cities are struggling to cope with hundreds of kids who don’t speak English and need to assimilate into American society–while potential terrorists may still be coming across a border that is anything but safe and secure.
And President Obama seems intent during the looming lame-duck session to grant amnesty to millions more of them. Why in the world is this happening?
Back in the real world, I keep coming back to a simple analogy: I would never consider having open doors and windows on my house. If I did, my wife would kill me for not protecting our family. So how can our federal government keep rationalizing open, porous borders in a world rife with terrorism and WMDs?
Why is our government not sealing the border for safe and orderly immigration practices?
ISIS
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria–or whatever you want to call them–are the most zealous and brutal barbarians that the world has seen since the German Third Reich (Nazis). They have no conscience toward the sacredness of human life, but seem to revel (demoniacally) in kidnapping and raping women, crucifying, mutilating and beheading anyone who resists them, and are intent on setting up a religious theocracy based on murder and fear.
A case can be made that we never should have toppled Sadaam Hussein from power (Bush administration). An even better case can be made that the Obama administration made a tragic error in not achieving a Status of Forces of Agreement with Iraq (as we did in Germany, Japan, Korea etc.), leading to the vacuum that ISIS filled.
Everyone seems to know, except the present administration, that the air campaign is neither degrading not destroying ISIS–rather the new Nazis continue their march toward Baghdad and Kobani while the sixty nation coalition remains a farce (not a force).
In my lifetime, the cauldron of evil in the Middle East–centered in ISIS and Iran–has never been at such a high boil. And our leadership appears to either look away, wring their hands, or go back to the golf course–even as heads are chopped off in abject mockery of American impotence.
Why is the United States not willing to account for its mistake and use grounds troops and special forces to crush and remove ISIS?
Ebola
The disaster of the month is not a murderous army or an illegal invasion, but a deadly disease that stalks some West African nations that has now been imported to America.
In late September, Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, a resident of Liberia, entered the United States with symptoms of Ebola and died of the disease on October 8 in a Dallas, Texas hospital. Ebola is an infectious and generally fatal disease marked by fever and severe internal bleeding, spread through contact with infected body fluids by a filovirus.
Duncan potentially contaminated scores of people while in the US, and just this week, two of his nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, came down with the disease. Others may follow.
Why is our government not restricting all visas and travel from West Africa until the plague is checked?
In all three of these instances, I would have expected George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, even Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, even Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower (the presidents of my lifetime) to make a concerted effort to protect the American people from this deadly disease.
It’s called a quarantine. So why won’t the Obama administration do it?
I think there are a number of possible answers:
First, President Obama does not believe that the primary role of government is to protect its citizens. Yes, he wears the title of “Commander in Chief” and has read a copy of the US Constitution, but I believe he has accepted the premise that the primary purpose of government is to provide for the people–not protect them. Hence, his huge and undeterred efforts on building a vast and dependent welfare state where government regulations on health, education, welfare, worldview, and social mores is the preferred focus.
Barack Obama has set his heart on the “fundamental transformation of the United States” which includes the eroding of our Judeo-Christian heritage, work ethic, economic system, and military into a social/secular democracy like many European nations. He sees government primarily as a provider of human services, not a guardian of personal liberties.
Thus, it’s easy to understand why our president spent the first two years of his presidency focusing on taking government control of health care and gutting the military back to pre-World War II levels. The remainder of his six years have been spent championing secular values (e.g. the re-definition of marriage), building a massive bureaucracy of environmental and financial regulations, and doubling welfare dependency.
Barack Obama likes being Big Daddy–not Commander in Chief.
Second, President Obama’s strength lies in fund-raising and campaigning more than leading a nation. As Dick Morris points out in his new book Power Grab, the true priority of the Obama administration is building a permanent social-democratic majority in the US–not solving the nation’s problems. President Obama’s worldview actually determines that he can’t solve the problems we’re facing. Hence he stays in his comfort zone of raising money and giving speeches because he doesn’t know what to do.
Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States with the thinnest resume in history. When elected to the Oval Office due to his charisma and oratorical skills, he had served only as a community organizer, state senator, and undistinguished 2-year US Senator. He’d never served in the armed forces, been an executive, started or run a business, or even met a payroll.
America made a huge mistake when it twice chose an inexperienced and ideologically driven man to lead our nation. His election exposed our own ignorance, narcissistic tendencies, our propensity toward dependency, and our lack of courage in facing the great threats of our time.
We are Barack Obama–he is a reflection of our majority values. He isn’t protecting us because we, too, want things more than liberty.
I hope that during the elections of 2014 and 2016 we will take a look in the mirror, repent of our selfish ways, and again build the personal and national character that once made us great.
Third, Barack Obama and other leaders like him are committed to down-sizing America’s influence and presence internationally. They believe that America does more bad than good around the world—that, we, somehow, are the main reason for the suffering and anti-pathy everywhere.
They fail to understand, that despite America’s mistakes and failures, our nation has been the greatest source of inspiration, deliverance, and development for other countries than any other in history. We’ve also been the greatest exporter of the Good News of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth–with over 120,000 missionaries currently serving in other lands.
America has blessed the world through winning two World Wars, bringing down the Soviet Union, supplying the economic engine for global growth and free markets, guarding the skies and shores of major continents, and leading the world in philanthropic and emergency aid.
That record should not be ignored or misunderstood. It should be built on and treasured.
Fourth, President Obama is either consciously, unconsciously, or, as a subject of Providence, helping to prepare the world for a new order of global government. Bible-based nations must be secularized in order for that to happen. The United Nations or some other entity must rise as the guardian of the peace. There must also be an economic calamity world-wide to cause a realignment of peoples and nations.
This may be a moment in history where the sins and ignorance of the American people paved the way for the ascendance of a leader who would complete the weakening of the last remaining faith-based superpower so that the entire planet could be changed.
I don’t blame Barack Obama for that. I blame we, the people, who have allowed it to happen. In the bigger scheme of things, God is sovereignly directing history toward its ultimate goal in the fulfilling of the Great Commission and the Return of Jesus Christ. The rise and fall of nations are a part of that equation.
To sum up, our government and its leaders are not protecting us because they are inept and have a different vision and agenda for America’s future.
We need to repent, pray with passion, go to the polls and vote for godly leaders, and trust our future to the only One who can revive nations as well as save souls.
When human leaders fail us, we can take comfort in this truth: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in times of trouble” (Psalms 46:1).
As fellow believers in Iraq, North Korea, and other nations are now being forced to learn, we must find our ultimate safety in God and God alone.
He will protect us from evil.
No Character, No Justice
If you live in a cave somewhere, are spending too much time on social media, or reside in another nation besides the United States and haven’t watched television recently, you might not know that marches, riots, and looting are taking place in a St. Louis, Missouri suburb called Ferguson.
Nearly every night for a week.
One of the main slogans of the marchers is “No Justice, No Peace.” I agree with the general maxim that righteousness in society helps to encourage public tranquility, but it goes much deeper than that.
Without character, there can be no peace, justice or freedom.
Here’s why.
First of all for those of you who have not been following the news, here are the facts about a police shooting in Ferguson that launched the rioting:
- On Saturday, August 9, 28-ear old Darren Wilson, a six year veteran of the Ferguson police department, shot and killed eighteen year old Robert Brown during the middle of the day. Wilson is white and Brown was black.
- Just prior to the shooting, Brown robbed a convenience store (stealing some cigars) while bullying one of its employees. The robbery was caught on tape and released by the local police department.
- Shortly after the robbery, Wilson saw Brown walking in the middle of a street and told him to get to the sidewalk. He did not respond to the policeman and an altercation followed.
- Brown was a big teenager–six foot four inches and nearly three hundred pounds. He was unarmed at the time of shooting.
- Brown was shot six times–all bullets entering the front of his body, indicating he was facing Wilson during the skirmish. Wilson was hurt in the fight and needed medical attention at a local hospital.
- There are conflicting eyewitness reports on the altercation. A friend of Brown’s, who was walking with him when the confrontation took place, says that the policeman was the aggressor, trying to pull Brown into the squad car. After the scuffle, the friend says that they ran away from the car and then Brown put his hands up as if to surrender. According to the friend, Wilson still shot the teenager in cold blood.
- According to Officer Wilson (via a friend), he had heard on the radio of the robbery, assumed it might be Brown, and confronted him. Brown then pushed him into the car, went for his gun and it went off. Brown then ran from the car, but when Wilson told him to freeze, Brown taunted him and began racing back toward him. Fearing for his life, Brown fired six bullets until he went down.
- Brown had traces of marijuana in his system at the time of his death.
Those are the facts about the event. Notice that I have given no commentary because it is way too early to discern what really happened and who is telling the truth. That will be left to an investigation and possible court trial.
Yet many people–and even some news outlets–have already tried the police officer in the court of public opinion and and found him guilty of race-motivated murder.
How do I know that? Here are the facts of that case:
- The predominantly black community of Ferguson has marched every evening holding signs indicating their certain verdict of Wilson’s guilt and Brown’s innocence.
- Stores have been looted and ransacked in response to the clamor for “justice” i.e. guilt for Darren Wilson for murdering Michael Brown.
- Some of America’s race hustlers–like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton–have descended on Ferguson to join the marchers and stir up the crowds. Jackson even tried to raise money for his race baiting empire at a Ferguson rally. (Fortunately, the crowd booed his money-grubbing approach.)
- Both CNN and MSNNBC did stories which shared only one side of the eyewitness accounts–the one that implicated the white officer. On CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage, one commentator stated falsely that “Michael Brown was shot in the back.” No one challenged the accusation.
- President Obama took time off from his Martha’s Vineyard vacation to “ask for calm” in Ferguson. That was an appropriate thing, but he then made other statements that indicated that the killing might be racially motivated and that black young men are unnecessarily targeted in poor communities by white policemen.
- Eric Holder and fifty FBI agents have been sent to Ferguson to “get to the bottom of the case.” This seems a bit much as 20 murders take place in Chicago each week and no feds are dispatched to look into the “injustices” there.
So it appears to any fair-minded person that all of the above are trying to push race as the reason for this unfortunate death well before the facts can be learned.
To which I say, “No Patience, No Justice.”
No person, especially a police officer who puts his life on the line every day to protect our safety, should be assumed guilty for racial crimes until that is proved in a court of law.
Law and justice take time.
At least Fox News avoided the “gun-happy police” frenzy. Last night, the O-Reilly Factor shared the facts about police shootings in the United States for 2012 (the last year we have statistics). Here they are:
- In 2012, there were 12 million crimes that took place in the United State among our 320 million residents.
- 42% of those crimes were committed by whites, 34% by blacks, and 24% by Hispanics.
- Blacks are only 13% of the US population, but commit a high percent of the crimes.
- 34,000 crimes are committed everyday in the United States.
- The number of police shootings during those 34,000 daily crimes: 422.
Yes, you read that number right. Of the 34,000 times daily that American police confronted law breakers, only 1.2 percent of the time did the police use a gun.
That’s hardly being trigger happy.
There are no statistics that tell us whether those 422 shootings were committed by white or black cops. But it doesn’t matter.
Police shootings are rare–period.
So why is there such a rush to judgment in Ferguson, marches every night demanding “justice” (guilt) for white Officer Wilson when no investigation or trial is complete?
Let the investigation or courts discover who the truth. If the facts eventually show that Officer Wilson wrongfully murdered Michael Brown, then he should face stiff consequences for his crime. If the facts say that Michael Brown wrongly threatened and pummeled a police officer, and lost his life because of it, then he should not be viewed as a victim or hero.
So why do some black leaders in America rush to Missouri to create the impression that whites hate blacks, white policeman target black young men, and that we still live in segregated and discriminatory America when the facts say otherwise?
I’m sure there are a number of reasons, but most of them are not good including winning elections, padding their wallets, and preying on peoples’ fears.
None of this would be happening if we had the heart and character of a courageous black man named Martin Luther King who would certainly be denouncing the looting and rioting if he were alive today. Dr. King said that we must judge people not by “the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
So, according to MLK, here’s what should be happening in Ferguson and in the United States:
1. The marches should be peaceful. That takes character in the lives of concerned citizens.
2. There should be no looting of private property. That’s anarchy and taking advantage of the sobering events. When you see people benefiting from a tragedy for their own selfish gain, you know you are looking at devilish behavior–not godly character. Character respects the rights of others.
3. The entire nation should be patient as the wheels of justice turn and the case is settled judicially. Patience is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit and one of the essential aspects of personal character (Romans 5:3-5).
Here’s a good summary of principles to reflect on:
If there’s no patience, there can be no justice–because time is required for facts to be learned.
If there is no character in our actions, then there can be no peace–just the abuse of others.
If we refuse to live by the godly character that Dr. King espoused, then there can be no freedom in neighborhoods, cities and towns.
And a final truth: a greater degree of character, peace, and patience is produced in a nation when people have surrendered to the Lordship of Jesus who can rescue us from our selfish appetites. Even when there is patience and character, sometimes justice is not fully served on earth.
But it will be in eternity through the Prince of Peace.
Saving Liberalism: An Appeal to My Progressive Friends
I’ve never liked the words “liberal” or “conservative” to describe people because I’m both liberal and conservative in the historic meaning of the words.
The problem comes when words carry multiple meanings or change over time and end up connotating something far different than when they were first introduced.
Words are sometimes like the proverbial frog boiling in the kettle: slowly and subtlety they can change over the years and need to be either renounced due to distortion or renewed to their original context.
I want to make an appeal to my liberal, progressive friends today. Liberalism has devolved; It is in danger of becoming nothing less than brute force– which is not liberal.
Will you join with me in saving liberalism?
I’ve been thinking about this subject for some time, and this week I read an article by Michael Barone that expressed my hunches better than I could.
Barone is the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, and one of the most knowledgeable political pundits in America. He is probably the nation’s leading authority on the political demographics of the United States. Name any county or Congressional District in the nation and Michael Barone can tell you why and how they will vote.
He’s also an independent man who is not an ideologue for either liberal or conservative politics. And he’s spot on regarding the present and extremely dangerous devolution of liberalism.
Here are his recent thoughts after which I will make some suggestions about how liberalism can be saved.
How Obama is Turning Liberalism into an Instrument of Coercion
By Michael Barone
Liberals just aren’t very liberal these days. The word “liberal” comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, free trade — for minimal state interference in people’s lives.
In the 20th-century, New Dealers revised this definition by arguing that people had a right not only to free speech and freedom of religion but also, as Franklin Roosevelt said in his 1941 Four Freedoms speech, freedom from fear and from want.
Freedom from want meant, for Roosevelt, government provision of jobs, housing, health care and food. And so government would have to be much larger, more expensive and more intrusive than ever before.
That’s what liberalism has come to mean in America and much of the Obama Democrats’ agenda are logical outgrowths — Obamacare, the vast expansion of food stamps, attempted assistance to underwater homeowners.
But in some respects the Obama Democrats want to go further — and are complaining that they’re having a hard time getting there. Their form of liberalism is in danger of standing for something like the very opposite of freedom–for government coercion of those who refuse to behave the way they’d like.
Example one is the constitutional amendment, sponsored by 43 of the 55 Democratic U.S. senators, which would cut back on the First Amendment and authorize Congress and state legislatures to restrict political speech [i.e. fund-raising).
The amendment is poorly drafted and leaves many questions dangerously open, perhaps because its sponsors know it has no significant chance of passage.
It also seems animated by a delusionary paranoia: Democrats profess to be afraid that conservatives will be swamped by a flood of rich people’s money, even though rich Democratic supporters have raised more than the other side in recent years.
Nonetheless the picture is striking. Many conservatives wanted to change the First Amendment in order to prosecute flag burning, not the Founding Fathers’ central concern. Today’s liberals, in contrast, want to change the First Amendment to restrict political speech, which is the core value the Founders sought to protect.
Or consider liberals’ recent attitude toward free exercise of religion, made plain in their reaction to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision declaring the Obamacare contraception mandate invalid as a violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The RFRA was passed, with three dissenting votes, and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993. It was prompted by a Supreme Court decision upholding the penalization of Oregon Indians for using peyote, which they claimed was a religious rite.
In passing RFRA, liberals and conservatives alike responded as Americans have often done when small groups have claimed laws infringed their religious beliefs: They put a higher priority to a few individuals’ free exercise of religion than they did to widely supported laws of general application.
Thus Congress allowed for conscientious objectors to be exempt from military service in World War II, in which more than 400,000 U.S. service members died. Even in a national emergency, when lives were at stake, Americans were willing to accommodate religious beliefs that a large majority did not share.
Today’s liberals take a different view. They want to make Hobby Lobby’s owners pay for what they regard as the destruction of human life. They spent much time arguing the owners are mistaken (actually, Hobby Lobby had a plausible scientific basis for their belief).
But the point about freedom of religion isn’t that everyone has to agree. On the contrary: Almost no one agreed with the Oregon Indians’ beliefs about peyote. They just thought the larger society should not use compulsion to bar them from practicing their religion.
Today’s liberals seem comfortable with using the force of law to prevent people from doing so.
Or consider the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn, ruling that care givers for disabled relatives paid with Medicaid funds are not state employees and thus cannot be forced into a public employee union.
Today’s liberals did this in President Obama’s Illinois to channel public money away from low-income care givers and toward public employee unions that do so much to fund and support the Democratic Party. They seem unembarrassed by this crass political motive and indifferent to the plight of the needy.
Today’s liberals seem bent on pushing people around, preventing them from speaking their minds and practicing their beliefs. It’s not just the language that’s changed.
Barone is right. American liberalism has dangerously altered course in the past century–and even in the past six years.
Noah Webster’s original 1830 dictionary summarizes the classical view of liberalism:
1. To be liberal is to be free to be generous–to give or bestow blessings.
2. To be liberal is to not be self-centered, but have an enlarged mind regarding others and their needs.
3. To be liberal is the embrace literature and sciences (as in a liberal arts education).
4. To be liberal is to desire to liberate or make people free. The word itself comes from the Latin liber or “free.”
I’m a liberal according to that definition. I wholeheartedly agree with all the meanings.
British jurist John Locke is widely recognized as father of liberalism. In his “Two Treatises of Government” which were first published in 1690, Locke taught that men had God-given rights to “life, liberty and estate (property)”–i.e. people were meant to be free–something no king, religion, or cultural tradition could usurp.
His ideas found Christian expression in the birth of America and the Declaration of Independence, and a fascist form in the French Revolution where two million people died–400,000 of them by execution. Both revolutions were based on the concept of “freedom”–but one was brought about by virtue and principle and the other by bloodthirsty force.
The founders of the American Revolution were all classical liberals, not fascists. Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism says this was due to American exceptionalism. “American culture supersedes our legal and constitutional framework. It is our greatest bulwark against fascism.”
Goldberg says that today’s “conservatives are the more authentic classical liberals.” In fact, Goldberg points out that in the past fifty years, it was been conservative leaders that have really carried on the legacy of Lockian liberalism:
“Conservatives were launching an extensive project to restore the proper place of the Constitution in American life [during the latter 20th century]. No leading conservative scholar or intellectual celebrated fascist themes or ideas. No leading conservative denigrated the inherent classical liberalism of the United States political system. To the contray, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley and other conservatives dedicated themselves to restoring the classical liberal vision of the founders.”
Yet, as Michael Barone laments, today’s liberals are turning their backs on their heritage and are beginning to behave like totalitarian fascists, not true liberals–forcing their ideas and morality down the throats of the American people.
I appeal to my progressive friends to wake up and see that your liberalism is being hijacked by a spirit of force and control.
This is not liberalism. It is coercion or bondage (non-freedom).
It’s the same spirit behind fascism, communism, militant Islam, and ISIS who recently forced all Christians in Mosul, Iraq to either convert to Islam or be killed.
We’re not that extreme yet. Our culture (exceptional Christian heritage) still prevents it. But we’re on our way, and the devolution of liberalism into force or coercion has picked up steam during the Obama years.
Let’s be true liberals through a renewal of faith, freedom, generosity–and true conservatives by preserving our culture through the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
This means anchoring ourselves to the Bible–the source of liberal ideals (freedom) as well as conservative ones (wisdom).