It's Our Own Damn Fault

When the Supreme Court made their ruling on gay marriage, those of us who spoke out against the Court even taking the case - let alone our disagreement with the actual ruling - warned that this type of thing would come.

We said that it wasn't going to stop with owners of private companies being forced to go against their religious beliefs.

We raised the alarm and predicted purely religious organizations would be targeted and smeared for not bowing down to a micro-minority but very vocal subset of society.

"You're crazy!" we were told.

"Homophobes!" we were called.

"Bigots! You just don't want equal rights!" they exclaimed.

We were ridiculed, belittled, excoriated by the Left for raising that alarm. Yet here we are, watching it happen exactly as we said it would.

Religious liberty is enumerated as our very FIRST Right in the Bill of Rights.  It comes before free speech, the right to bear arms, petition the government.

All of them come after the right to practice your religion as you see fit, provided that practice doesn't infringe on another's rights in any way.

The Founders held this right as sacrosanct, perhaps inviolable even, which is understandable given the tyranny they had just fought a long war to be rid of.

What makes this all the worse is that the Georgia law - and here's the really important part - only protected overtly religious organizations, like churches and charities. It had nothing whatsoever to do with private companies or individuals. The scope was limited, targeted for just that reason.

In this day and age, immorality is becoming increasingly acceptable to wider and wider swathes of people who don't seem to care what problems they cause for future generations as long as they get what they want RIGHT NOW and to Hell with anyone else.

I no longer recognize the America I once knew - the America where people had the freedom to do what they wanted, act how they wanted, be who they wanted to be regardless what society wanted and within the framework of the Rule of Law.

The age of the individual is over. The Rule of Law has ended. This "Great Experiment" in self-governance is dying a slow, painful, ignominious death and it's our own damn fault.

The lessons learned by, and from, the Founders have been all but forgotten and for that we should all be ashamed. ~ Hunter

The 2016 Presidential Election Became Even MORE Important Yesterday

As most of you know, the United States suffered a terrible tragedy yesterday with the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Most people who frequent this page also know that I have no love of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate or a human being. I have done my level best to make clear that Trump has never been a conservative. His unwavering support for "eminent domain" should be proof enough of that.
Fans of this page also know that I've been very vocal in my support for Ted Cruz in his bid to become the Republican presidential nominee. His record clearly indicates that he's the only principled Constitutional conservative in this race, with Carson coming in second in that category.
While I have no real objection to Carson becoming the nominee, my only misgivings with the man are that he just seems too nice and too naive in the ways of politics for him to succeed in this political climate. In a bygone era, he most probably would have made an extremely good, if not phenomenal president.
The single biggest reason I'm a Cruz supporter is the very same reason I was instantly depressed and fearful when I learned of Justice Scalia's passing - conservatism. More specifically, constitutional conservatism. If the reign of King DingleBarry has proven nothing else it's that those on the Left quite literally loathe the founding document that is the very foundation of American governance.
Justice Scalia was a brilliant jurist and outspoken advocate of the strict interpretation of the overarching law of the land. He truly believed that deference should be given to the actual words of the Constitution was of utmost importance and anything not contained therein should default to the individual states and/or the individual citizens. When Scalia was called home to God, my very first thought was that the Constitution may have died with him.
Ted Cruz believes the same as Scalia - that the Constitutional principles this nation was founded upon are of greatest import and that if we are to survive as a nation, the United States need to return to those principles. The next president could make at least three appointments to the Supreme Court, which makes who is elected vitally significant.
If you desire to return to the days when the government and its power to interfere in your everyday lives was limited, if you wish for the Constitution to regain its prominence, I encourage you to vote Cruz in your state's primary.
This very well may be our last chance to avert the destruction of the United States. She's not without her faults and she's certainly had her darker times, but overall, America has been the only consistent force for good around the world since her birth.
If you wish to keep going along this path of destruction, I invite you to vote for any of the rest of the candidates - Kasich, Bush, Rubio, Sanders, Clinton, or Trump. The only real difference I see between any of them is how fast the destruction occurs. Kasich, Bush, and Rubio, thanks to their stated positions on varied topics would all be nothing more than "managers" of the decline. They certainly won't stop it.
Comrades Bernie and Clinton would mean nothing less than​ unmitigated disasters for America. They're both so consumed with envy and hatred that they intend to just give away everything they can - indeed, they're eager to give it away - adding to an already monstrously crippling national debt that is likely to be close to 22 TRILLION DOLLARS when the next president is inaugurated. Think about that for a second - Obama has more than doubled the national debt incurred by every single one of his predecessors combined and God help us if Sanders gets elected. Just the proposals he's made so far would double the debt yet again in ten years. I know 18 trillion is just an estimate, but it's a low ball estimate.
What about Trump? Oh, The Trumpertantrum is a special case. As far as I can figure, there is no appreciable difference between Trump and the two socialists masquerading as Democrats. His past positions for very liberal ideas and actions should be the loudest alarm bells possible for conservative voters - things like abortion, gun control, progressive taxes, the aforementioned eminent domain, single-payer healthcare (like Bernie Sanders), etc. Let's not mention his constant disdain and outright hatred directed at those who disagree with him. To put a finer point on things as far as SCOTUS nominees, in August of 2105 - well into his presidential run - Trump said that his sister, a well-known advocate of abortion in general, and a vocal supporter of partial-birth abortion, would make a "phenomenal" Supreme Court Justice.
As a conservative, these positions worry me. What worries me even more, however, is the fact that so many of his supporters don't seem to care about his past positions and take his self-professed change of heart at face value. Have we, as a supposedly conservative electorate, really fallen so far that we'll take a catchy slogan and run with it like he's the second coming of Ronald Reagan or Calvin Coolidge? Do we really want to be compared - in any way - to those who elected King DingleBarry based on a catchy slogan? I don't know about you, but that's not the legacy I intend to leave my grandchildren.
It's time to stop dancing around what's wrong with America for fear of "political correctness" - on this, I agree with Trump. But I refuse to be suckered into voting against my principles once again. In that, my friends, you can rest assured I will not be compromised.
My vote is for Ted Cruz. As a conservative, I don't see that there's any other choice. ~ Hunter

Establishment And Free Exercise Thereof: What The First Amendment REALLY Is

I've never understood the mindset of people who claim that this isn't a Christian nation, or the religion was never meant to be part of government.

 

The "freedom of religion" part of the First Amendment is, in no way, a prohibition on religion in government. It is, however, a restriction on government in religion.

 

That restriction, known as the "establishment clause," means that the federal government cannot endorse a particular religion or sect over any other, nor can it require the people to worship a certain God, or require one to worship any God. A further prohibition on the establishment of its own religion, i.e., the Church of England, is intertwined with that.

 

The "free exercise" clause means exactly what it says - one is free to exercise one's religion freely, wherever and whenever one wants, provided that it does not endanger one's fellow citizens' lives. You can't hold Mass in the center lane of I-95, for example.

Separation of Church and State is an utter fallacy. It exists nowhere in our founding documents. The phrase itself is actually misquoted from a private letter Thomas Jefferson sent to the Danbury Baptist ministers responding to their fears that the U.S. government was about to choose an official religion. The actual phrase reads - "separation between Church and State."

 

That word "between" brings a whole new meaning to it, doesn't it?

 

What Jefferson meant - coincidentally, the over- and mis-used quote from the Treaty of Tripoli about the U.S. government not being founded on the Christian religion also means the same thing - that the Church (not religion) wasn't the government, as it was in so much of Europe at that time, therefore the government had no business or inclination to establish an official religion.

 

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black coined the phrase "separation of Church and State," taking liberties with the meaning of the Constitution, despite having a reputation of being a literalist. As a member of the KKK (reputedly "just" to get votes), Black was very accustomed to taking liberties with the Constitution, despite his vote against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. For the record, Black was a veritable mass of contradictions.

 

To claim that religion and religious principles were never meant to be part of government is folly. Jefferson himself, a supposed atheist, attended Church services held in the Capitol Building, clearly disagreed with that sentiment.

 

Perhaps it's time to return to the vision of the Founders and Framers and stop thinking we know better what they meant than they did when they founded this nation and wrote the documents we're SUPPOSED to live by. ~ Hunter

 

 

The House That Obama Built

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." - King DingleBarry (multiple occasions)

"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." - King DingleBarry (multiple occassions)

"We have to pass the bill to see what's in it." - Former Speaker Nancy Piglosi

"I don't know who this Gruber character is." - Nancy Piglosi (apparently forgetting the existence of such small technological achievements like video recording, microphones, and the internet)

These are but a scant few of the lies surrounding the passage of the Petulant Pretender's legacy legislation. We, the informed people of the nation, were roundly excoriated for raising the alarm about it (even though everything we predicted has come to pass), being called racist, idiots, and a whole host of other vile epithets. We knew it was a lie, created with a lien based on lies, passed with the biggest lie of all, and cemented with a lie in SCOTUS.

Conventional wisdom would dictate that even those on the left would be angry by now, especially with their delicate sensibilities tweaked and supposed intellectual superiority having been downplayed as "stupid" by Gruber, one of the architects of the law.

Sadly, that's not the case, because - to the left - the ends justify the means, even if those ends are an abysmal failure (like all of liberalism).

But really, does it surprise - I mean truly surprise - anyone?

After all, liberalism is the biggest lie of all. ~ Hunter