Tag Archives: freedom

He Doesn’t Get It

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Baptist Minister Bruce Prescott, with the aid of the ACLU, is suing Oklahoma (specifically, the Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission) in a state court over the presence of a monument representing the Ten Commandments on the state’s Capitol grounds.

Prescott told Oklahoma City’s News9

It’s inappropriate, it’s not the right place.  Put it on the doorpost, that’s what the Bible says; it doesn’t say to put it at the State Capitol.

Here’s what he doesn’t get: the State Capital is the doorpost for all the citizens of Oklahoma.

Too, his ACLU representatives are ignoring the facts that this is a privately funded and erected monument and that the Supreme Court already has ruled that such monuments in the public square—or on government grounds—are entirely appropriate so long as displays representing other religions or atheism are not barred.  Of course, the ACLU is not alleging such a barring.

Closing a Business is a Felony

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Justice James Clark McReynolds wrote 75 years ago, in a dissent from a Commerce Clause-impacting labor case, this in part:

We are told that Congress may protect the “stream of commerce….”  Therefore it is said he may be prevented from doing anything which may interfere with its flow.
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May a mill owner be prohibited from closing his factory or discontinuing his business because so to do would stop the flow of products to and from his plant in interstate commerce?

Apparently he can, when the stream of commerce’s products include government’s ability to spy on its citizen employers.

Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, Redux

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I wrote earlier about the Muslim Brotherhood and their assault on their fellow Egyptians’ freedom and on their very lives.

Here’s an update.

  • [Muslim Brotherhood] demonstrators torched two government facilities in Giza
  • attacks on Coptic Christians and their churches continued for a second day—as many as 39 incidents of violence against churches, monasteries, Coptic schools, and shops
  • protesters trapped a police Humvee on an overpass near the Nasr City camp and pushed it off…images…showed an injured policeman on the ground below, near a pool of blood and the overturned vehicle

Yet President Barack Obama is threatening a regime that answered the call of the people to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood dictator Mohammed Morsi.  He’s condemning their role in attempting to restore order and reopen parts of Cairo occupied by the Brotherhood while saying nothing about the Brotherhood’s violence, torchings, and murders beyond the usual Obamatalk blandishments about the need for…restraint.  And he’s cancelled joint exercises with the Egyptian military—cancelled them, rather than postponing them so they’re not a distraction while the Egyptians attempt to restore order.

Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo

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While the world, including our own government, decries the Egyptian government’s efforts to clear two Muslim Brotherhood encampments in downtown Cairo, it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind, regardless of what we might think about that crackdown.

The violence, the bloodshed, is entirely on the hands of the Brotherhood.  The police went in with water cannon and tear gas, and they were met with gunfire (including mortar rounds in other cities, as the Brotherhood’s decision to riot spread).  They’re openly rioting, but they’re cynically not limiting themselves to opposition to the Egyptian police: they’re also butchering any Coptic Christians that they can reach (generally in southern Egypt, as the Christians have been hunted out in the north, by this gang and others), desecrating these Christian churches in the process.  Never mind, just kill them all, seems to be the Brotherhood’s attitude.

The Brotherhood could have kept their protests peaceful.  Think what a powerful statement that would have been in the face of the force—however gentle—the police would still have had to use to clear those encampments.  Instead, the Brotherhood demanded violence, demanded to be killed in their protests so that they could be martyred.

This is a violent movement, bent on violent destruction of all who disagree with them.

Responsibility

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The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.  People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero understood this in 55 BC.  Rome failed to recover her sense of responsibility—personal and individual, as communities, as a nation—at all levels.  Tyranny arrived shortly after Cicero published his realization.