Search Results for: The Origin of Rights

The Origin of Rights

Too many people in America act and speak as if they believe rights, protected by the US Constitution, are granted by government, and therefore can be diminished or abolished by government decree. This assumption is not only wrong it is dangerous to the well being of every man, woman, and child in America, because if government is allowed to do this then no one’s life, liberty, or property is secure. Legally, this assumption does not have any precedent set in America’s founding documents and will not stand up in a court of law dedicated to biblical truth and justice.

Continue reading

What are Gay Rights?

By passing a majority opinion that married same-sex couples are entitled to federal benefits, the Supreme Court has once again stepped outside the realm of original intent in interpreting the Constitution. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community have always possessed the same rights as every citizen in the United States, hence there is no such thing as “gay rights”.

Continue reading

Contents

AFP_Color

 

Note: Some articles are in multiple Categories in the column to your right, but every article in the blog is listed and hyper linked under only one category below.

Amendments

Gun Control

Stopping the Next Columbine

IRS Double Standard

Commentary

The Audacity of Hopelessness

Constitutional Relevancy

Just Emancipation

The Death of a Nation

Flag of Contention

Obama and Socialism

Slavery in America

US Senate’s Brain Hemorrhaging Clout

Education Policy

Fixing Public Education

Rotten to the Common Core

Environmental Policy

Climate Change

Foreign Policy

A War to End Slavery

The American Civil War, Just or Unjust?

The Case Against Secession

Constitutional Foreign Policy

Law of Nations

Freedom

Freedom in America: Our Cultural Heritage

Freedom in America: The Unifying Idea

Freedom in America: Paradise Lost

Religious Freedom

This Land is Your Land

Heritage

The Forgotten Founding Father

The Lost Eastern Christian Empire

The South Was Wrong!

Immigration and Naturalization Policy

Immigration Reform

Labor Policy

Union of Socialist Souls Revealed

Law

Are all Laws Necessary?

Can States Constitutionally Secede from the United States?

The Constitution of the United States

Impeaching Supreme Court Justices

Is Religion the Foundation of Justice and Law?

Is Roe v Wade the Law of the Land?

Ruled by Man not by Law

The Supreme Court in the Age of Relativism

When is the President the Commander in Chief?

Monetary Policy

America’s Cyprus

The Birth of a National Fraud

Constitutional Currency

Income Inequality

National Defense Policy

Women in Combat

Politics

Government Shut Down

Living in the Legacy of Lincoln

Restoring the Electoral College

Washington Gridlock

Rights

The Origin of Rights

What are Gay Rights?

Speeches

Butler Pennsylvania Second Amendment Rally Speech

Memorial Day Speech 2012 Westminster, MD

One Nation Back to God Speech 11 Aug 2012

Valor Speech

Tax Policy

Constitutional Taxation

Who is General Welfare?

Gun Control

Every time a mass shooting happens in America, and before research or analysis for the actual cause can begin, many people and news outlets instantaneously clamor for national gun control as if they are following Rahm Emanuel’s dictum to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Such an approach speaks loudly that the issue is more about control than it is about guns.

As part of gun control advocates’ mantra and a cornerstone of their argument, they claim citizens don’t need “assault weapons” to hunt or to defend themselves in their homes. Although, it is true citizens can do both of these things without military style firearms, their claim misinterprets the intent of the Second Amendment and the right it was written to protect.

Continue reading

Is Roe v Wade the Law of the Land?

Since the Supreme Court passed down their landmark Roe v Wade opinion on January 22, 1973, approximately one and a half million unborn children have been sentenced to death each year in America. People who campaign for legalizing the murder of the unborn frequently use the slogan “Roe v Wade is the law of the land,” but this is contrary to what the supreme law of the Land actually says. Article I Section 1 Clause 1 of the US Constitution states, “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

Continue reading

Fixing Public Education

The Chicago Teacher’s Union strike, in September of 2012, is yet another reminder of how unproductive our public education system has become. Over 400,000 students had to stay at home while the teacher’s union and teachers held Chicago hostage for a 25% increase in salary and a halt on teacher performance standards. If those demands were not greedy enough by themselves, they came on top of the fact that Chicago teachers were already the highest paid in our nation. Their average salary at the time was approximately $76K per year while the tax payer, who has to support them, averaged only around $46K per year.

Continue reading

Ask Questions

AFP_Color

Please type your question(s) in the “LEAVE A REPLY” box at the bottom of this page.

FAQs:

Is the Constitution a living document?

Yes and no, it is living in the sense that it can be amended, yet it is not living in the sense that anyone, including the Supreme Court, can interpret it by any other means than its original intended meaning of each word or clause.

Is the Constitution a secular document?

No, the overwhelming majority of the framers of the Constitution held an orthodox Christian worldview as did the founding culture that ratified the Constitution. Evidence of this is found in two places within the document. The first is in Article I, Section 7 where it states, “If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted)…” They exempted Sunday, because it was the Lord’s day of rest and not a work day. The second is in Article VII, where it states, “done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven…” They dated the Constitution by the birth of their Lord, Jesus Christ and no group of atheists, agnostics, deists or secularists would have done that.

Were the founding fathers a bunch of atheists?

No, none of the founders were atheists, because each of them acknowledged a supreme being in one form or another.

Were the founding fathers a bunch of deists?

Although, there was one person who exerted significant influence in, provided prominent leadership for, or had a substantial impact upon the birth, development, and establishment of America as an independent, self-governing nation that can be classified in some sense as a deist, Thomas Paine, the very few other less religious founding fathers may not have been devout Christians, like Benjamin Franklin, or may have strayed from orthodox Christianity towards the end of their life, like Thomas Jefferson, but by the testimony of their own words, they were not deists.

Were the founding fathers a bunch of white slave owners?

Although it is true each of the founding fathers were white Europeans not all of them owned slaves. Only thirty-five of the fifty-five signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners and of those, many spoke out against the institution of slavery.

Is the Constitution a pro-slavery document?

No, the Constitution outlawed the importation of slaves after January 1808 (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1) and the three-fifths rule (Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3) limited representation from pro-slavery States, so they could not disproportionately dominate the House of Representatives to pass pro-slavery legislation. The three-fifths rule was not, as many have claimed, a measure of human worth on slaves.

Were the founders against women’s rights?

If by this question one is implying the founders restricted women from voting, they are mistaken, because voting qualifications were not included as one of the powers delegated to the national government. The House of Representatives was the only entity, at the national level, for which the founders intended its members to be elected via popular vote. As Article I, Section 2 states, “the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” This means each State was to determine voter qualifications and as such, voter qualifications were out of the jurisdiction of the national government.

To answer the original question more directly, the founders were pro-family not anti-women. If one judges the founders by modern standards, it is easy to understand why a person would think of them in a way they would never have considered, but doing so is a grave injustice. Historical figures must be judged by the standards of their day. The founders saw women as equals while they also respected and held sacred the family unit and it was in their upholding the family unit over so called “women’s rights”* that modern Americans have misinterpreted their intent.

The founders understood nations are nothing more than groups of families, so without families their would not be any nations. They endeavored to uphold biblical gender roles** in society in an effort to preserve the nation’s posterity and honor God. This is not to imply each and every one of them perfectly upheld the biblical standard on gender relations, but as a society they made a better attempt at it than American culture has since that time.

*For more about women’s rights see The Origin of Rights.

**For more about gender roles see Women in Combat.

Is it constitutional to shut down the government?

It is true no express power has been delegated to any of the three branches to shut the government down, yet when the government is shut down it is the undesired outcome of a failure to meet constitutional obligations. Specifically, Article I, Section 9 “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law;” When lawmakers are unable to legislate appropriations (funding bills) then the government is unable to legally meet its obligations and must stop spending until such appropriations are made.

Where can one find a list of the Founding Principles established by the founders?

Nowhere. Principles are generally not listed, but instead derived from the writings and speeches people make. In order to derive the Founding Principles, one must study the worldview of the founders to understand the source of their morals and values. It is from these morals and values we can understand the underlying principles upon which they based their decisions.

When did they amend the Constitution to make secession illegal?

The Constitution has never been amended to make secession illegal and secession is just as legal today as when the States and the people ratified the Constitution and when Lincoln illegally violated that State right in 1861. See The Case Against Secession.

Was the United States founded as a theocracy?

The answer to this question is contingent upon one’s understanding of theocracy. If by ‘theocracy’ a person means a nation governed by clergy of a church, or some other organized religion, then the answer is absolutely no. That type of government, where an organized religion holds power over a state, is actually called an ‘ecclesiocracy.’

If, on the other hand, one defines ‘theocracy’ by its Greek origin, where ‘theo-’ means ‘god’ and ‘-cracy’ means ‘rule’, then the answer is yes. The founders of America understood the God of the Holy Bible, the father of Abraham, whose Son is Jesus Christ, was the lawgiver to the nation they founded.

They made this clear in Article VII of the US Constitution by dating that document “in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven.” If anyone is interested in understanding, in more detail, how the God of the Bible is the lawgiver of America see Is Religion the Foundation of Justice and Law?, Religious Freedom, and The Origin of Rights.

Why did the founders use the word “Militia” in the Second Amendment instead of just saying, “all citizens have the right to keep and bear arms”?

In order to answer this question let us first break down the sentence into its grammatical parts. The independent clause of the Second Amendment, also known as the main point, is “the right … shall not be infringed”; “the people” is an object of the preposition “of” and modifies “right”; “to keep and bear” is an infinitive phrase which also modifies “right”; and the participial phrase “being necessary to the security of a free State” acts as an adjective modifying “Militia”. This leaves us with the question, “What role does the phrase ‘A well regulated Militia’ play in the sentence?”

It is uncommon in modern syntax to begin a sentence with an appositive, a noun or noun phrase that renames a noun right beside it, so the natural inclination for modern readers is to assume “Militia” is the main noun of the sentence and the phrase “the right…” is an appositive to the most immediately preceding noun, “security”, which by itself does not make much sense. When reading the Second Amendment, however, we all must keep in mind that beginning sentences with appositives was not uncommon in our founding era and that is exactly what the framers of the Bill of Rights did in the Second Amendment.

This means the main predicate, “shall not be infringed”, which makes an assertion about the sentence subject, modifies the main subject “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,”; i.e., that the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. The phrase “A well regulated Militia” is an appositive that better describes “the people” where “the right of the people” is the main subject of the sentence.

We can be assured this is the intended meaning because of the way our founders defined “Militia”; i.e., they understood it as a synonym for all American citizens. George Mason described it as “the whole people, except for a few public officials.”

To answer the question more directly, the authors of the Second Amendment used “Militia” to better describe the primary purpose for the people to keep and bear arms; i.e., to maintain the security of a free State. As long as all citizens can keep and bear arms without infringement they have a means to resist tyranny, but when those rights are infringed they lose their freedom. Please read Gun Control for more detailed information.

This entry was posted on August 25, 2012, in . 9 Comments

Guns Don’t Kill People, Public Schools Do!

Public schools, unlike guns, actually influence what and how people think, believe, and behave. Guns, on the other hand, as inanimate objects, do not and cannot influence anyone to do anything. All of the violence that has been committed in our schools has one thing in common, and it is not an AR-15. All of the violence that has been committed in our schools has been committed in government schools, commonly called “public schools”. In order to stop what the Liberal Left has labeled “gun violence” we should ban government schools not guns. All Americans, who understand that the Liberal Left’s view of life does not work, cannot work, and will never work, no matter how it is implemented, should band together to ban government schools, because their philosophy is literally killing our school children.

Public Schools Kills People Image

Continue reading

The Forgotten Founding Father

In a nation that appears to be doing everything possible to expunge the remnants of its Christian foundation and heritage, it is no wonder that John Calvin has been forgotten as the virtual founder of our nation. John Adams, America’s second President; Leopold von Ranke, a nineteenth century leading German historian; and George Bancroft, a Harvard educated historian known as the “father of American history”, all testified to the significant influence Calvin had upon the foundation of America.

Unlike Locke or Montesquieu, Calvin did not write a political treatise on how to organize civil government. Instead, he wrote Biblical expositions that completely changed how people in western culture thought about their relation to God and, subsequently, how they thought about their relation to their civil government.

John Calvin

Continue reading

Slavery in America

Over one-hundred and fifty years after the Thirteenth Amendment[1] abolished involuntary slavery and servitude in America; slavery is still a very sensitive subject, especially for “African” Americans. Much of this apprehension has its origins in an historical view that Africans and their descendants are somehow less civilized, less intelligent or preposterously less “evolved” from assumed animal ancestors than their white counterparts. Yet, instead of looks of derision or treatment as second class citizens, all Americans owe the men and women who were enslaved in America and their descendants  a debt of gratitude equal to the gratitude bestowed upon patriots who fought to secede from England in America’s war for independence.

Continue reading