Where Are the Modern Day Sons of Liberty? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    We talk a lot today about how the Constitution no longer means what it used to and it no longer protects individual freedom and liberty as it used to. We say this because a government of limited and defined powers has steadily and without apology become a government of broad and undefined powers. When a state should happen to assert its sovereignty and challenge the usurpation of power, the federal government issues a letter threatening to take them to court. The government knows that what the Constitution won't allow it to do, the courts will.

    But the situation is far more serious than what we thought. Yes, our Constitution is and has been under attack. And yes, the relationship between the individual and the government has been fundamentally altered. But the document that perhaps may be even more significant to us as Americans, the Declaration of Independence, is also under attack. The attack, if we want to be intellectually honest, started with the man the government touts as the greatest American president Abraham Lincoln.

    Just as the Constitution was fundamentally transformed as the American people slept and as they became virtual strangers to their own history and heritage, the Declaration has been eroded because of the same reason.

    John Adams once said: "A constitution of government once changed from freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever." The American people don't know how close they are to losing the very gifts they have taken for granted for so long. We here today will enjoy the last remnants of freedom, but through our actions, our neglect, our spite, and our ignorance we may condemn our children and grandchildren to repurchase it, perhaps with their lives. It may be too late.

    What shame we should feel that the people we love most in this world - our children - will not be able to exercise liberty as fully and enjoy property as unconditionally as we did when we were young. The most important property of all - that which stems from our minds, our hearts, and our ambitions - has come increasingly under the control of the federal government, to be regulated for others rather than protected for the individual.

    Our greatest shame should be in the reality that posterity will have to buy back a gift we were supposed to preserve for them.

    The problem today is that we've too long forgotten what makes us uniquely American. It's not the heritage we bring with us to add to this melting pot we call the United States. No, it's the very thing that Martin Luther King referred to in his "I Have a Dream" speech - the promissory note that all Americans are entitled to. "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as well as the guarantee that government would be protect those rights. That promissory note attaches to us at our birth and attaches to everyone who comes to America's shores looking for freedom and the American Dream. In the United States, individual liberty is the product of natural law and God's law and not a token gift from a benevolent government. In the United States, government doesn't grant rights; it protects them. Our laws apply in times of good and bad; they apply to good people and bad people. The Bill of Rights has no exemptions for "really bad people" or even non-citizens. The Bill of Rights, as prefaced in its preamble as "further declaratory and restrictive clauses" on the power delegated to the government in the Constitution - is an important check on government power against any person. That is not a weakness in our legal system; it is the very strength of our legal system. And at the core of what defines America is that grand moral proclamation so eloquently articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

    For too many years, Americans have remained silent as precious liberty interests have been taken away from them. It's been a slow, progressive erosion indeed. We today are guilty too, if not more than any other generation. We don't understand that our freedom and liberty is only as secure as the foundation that supports and protects it. And every bit of that foundation is being eroded or has been eroded, including the notion of individual sovereignty (as I've pointed out in my previous article - "What It Means to be Sovereign" - http://forloveofgodandcountry.com/2013/07/30/what-it-means-to-be-sovereign/).

    We no longer jealously guard what our Founding Fathers sought to accomplish when they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for and what our forefathers fought and died for. The spirit of the American Revolution is dead. Patrick Henry warned that we should never lose that spirit. Yet, when the Constitution was written and then presented to the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 - only one year after it was written in Philadelphia - Henry took the floor and listed a series of issues he found with the document, all "tending to re-establish a monarchy" and subjecting citizens to the type of government that they had just dissolved their bonds of allegiance with. He accused the Virginians of already losing the spirit of the Revolution and being too willing to surrender their freedoms. He warned them to guard "that precious jewel," which is liberty.

    Before the Revolution, as we all know, the British Parliament imposed the Stamp Act - a tax on documents. The colonists did everything in their power, mostly through the Sons of Liberty, to frustrate its enforcement. They protested, hung British officials in effigy, organized angry mobs, threw rocks at the homes of officials tasked with collecting the tax, and otherwise intimidated such officials so that most resigned. In short, the Stamp Act could not be enforced. The colonists stood up for their rights (the right NOT to have a government in some far off land legislate for them and tax them without their representation). As Benjamin Franklin (who was acting as the ambassador to England from Massachusetts at the time) tried to explain to Parliament: "The Stamp Act says we shall have no commerce, make no exchange of property with each other, neither purchase nor grant, nor recover debts; we shall neither marry nor make our wills, unless we pay such and such sums; and thus it is intended to extort our money from us or ruin us by the consequence of refusing to pay it.... They (the colonists) think it extremely hard and unjust that a body of men in which they have no representatives should make a merit to itself of giving and granting what is not its own but theirs, and deprive them of a right they esteem of the utmost value and importance, as it is the security of all their other rights." A member of Parliament then asked Franklin if the colonists know their rights, and Franklin responded that they know them very well indeed. Franklin went on to warn Parliament that if the Stamp Act was not repealed, the colonies would likely revolt.

    Next came the tax on tea. The King and Parliament were mindful of the rising passions of the colonists and their "revolutionary spirit." In order to impose a tax yet not burden the colonists, Parliament secured a great surplus of tea from the East India Company. Because it was a surplus, it would be sold to the colonies at a lower price. On top of that, there would be a tax imposed of 3 pence per pound. It was no doubt, a minute tax on the tea. With the reduced price plus the tax, colonists would still be paying less for tea than they had paid before. There was no burden. Yet, we know what happened. We know that about 100 members of the Sons of Liberty dressed up as Mohawk Indians and dumped 342 chests of tea into the Boston Harbor to protest that minute tax. They protested, not because the tax imposed a hardship, but because they were smart enough and liberty-minded enough to recognize the violation of their rights which was at the core of that tax. They would not submit.

    Today, we stand idly by even while the government destroys chunks of our liberties. When the 2011-2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was passed, the Obama administration added a new clause (to the original Authorization of Military Force, AUMF, which Bush requested to hunt down and prosecute the perpetrators of 9/11). Instead of targeting the perpetrators of 9/11, the federal government added a clause to target US citizens, on American soil, who are engaged in hostilities against the United States (undefined terms, of course). Once targeted, they are stripped of their Bill of Rights and can be interrogated, tortured, and held indefinitely without a formal charge or without a trial. The Supreme Court created a special term for these Americans (reviving a term used by FDR in WWII) - "enemy combatants." The US Constitution already addresses these types of people - they are called "traitors" - and appropriate action is clearly spelled out, so as not to punish without recognizing inherent human rights. But our government needed a way to by-pass constitutional rights and so, we have the NDAA and the ability of the Executive Department to unilaterally attach the label of "enemy-combatant" to an American citizen. But what did the American people do when their rights were taken away? Most said: "Well, the government needs to do what it needs to do to keep us safe." And where was the outrage when the Supreme Court found that Obamacare was constitutional and the federal government can use the taxing power to compel human behavior in ways that in and of itself are unconstitutional (federal government has NO right to get involved in healthcare; it's not an enumerated function). Again, too many people were just happy to know the government will be ensuring that they have healthcare coverage than to appreciate the enormity of the violation of fundamental rights that underlies that decision. The debate over whether the government needs to restrain gun rights in order to stem violence in our schools is another issue. Sustainable development policies are another. The "Wall of Separation" and growing hostility of government against religion is another....

    The list goes on and on. We just sit back. We don't protest, we don't do all we can to frustrate the enforcement of unconstitutional federal laws or policies or even court decisions.... We've lost the Revolutionary spirit. We've lost the spirit in our hearts and minds that compels us to stand up for our precious liberties.

    And the sad thing, we've already lost so much.

    So the question is this: Why don't we care? Why aren't we doing more? And where is today's Sons of Liberty?

    Publisher's note: Diane Rufino has her own blog, For Love of God and Country. Come and visit her. She'd love your company.
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