From: matt@smoke.brl.mil (Matthew Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: misc.legal
Subject: Re: Oppose the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
Summary: Our liberties come from our Creator.
Keywords: no _kaffe klatsch_, no skinnin' and grinnin'
Date: 12 Jan 93 17:45:07 GMT
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Lab, APG MD.

In article <ripng.1.726572710@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au> 
ripng@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au (PAUL NG) writes:

>	The Australian Govt instituted conscription for the war 
>against the Japanese; JWs decided not to cooperate.  The govt passed 
>legislation outlawing the JWs.  JWs applied to the High Court of 
>Australia to declare the Act unconstitutional as infringing the 
>guarantee of religious freedom in the Constitution Act 1900. 
>	The HCA held to the effect that any guarantee is subject to the 
>qualification that the practices, institutions, etc. of any religion cannot 
>subvert the Constitution which is the source of that freedom, that is, you 
>can't bite the hand that feeds you.  [Paul Ng]

In the United States, we have our Constitution, which by its own terms
(Article VI, Clause 2) is the supreme law of the land, and we have our
1776 Declaration of Independence, which has no legal force whatever.
The Declaration declares that all men are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights, and that it is to secure these rights
that governments are instituted among men.  Further in the Declaration,
mention is made of the Law of Nature and of Nature's G-d.  This latter
concept is one that English and European clerics and philosophers debated 
for centuries, all the way back to Saint Thomas Aquinas's time.

One of our Founding Fathers was Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration
of Independence and later Third President of the United States.  He would
have been appalled at the HCA's characterization of the Constitution as
"the source of that freedom."  In his "Summary View of the Rights of
British America" (1774), Jefferson wrote:

   "The G-d who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time;
  the hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them."

In his "Notes on Virginia" (1781-2), Jefferson wrote:

   "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have
  removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the
  people that these liberties are . . . the gift of G-d?  That
  they are not to be violated but with His wrath?"

In the years since Tom Jefferson's time, America and the world have
seen members of the elite first lose faith in, then scorn the idea
that there is any higher source of rights than the laws that men pass
and the force they use to back up those laws.  (This is called, "Positive 
Law.")  U. S. Chief Justice Taney, in _Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S.
(19 How.) 393 (1856), reasoned that the phrase "all men" in the Declaration 
of Independence was never intended to include the Negro, to which Abraham
Lincoln replied that in that case, what was to prevent some future Court
from declaring that the phrase was never intended to include some other
group?

In this century, racist, Fascist Nazis worshipped force and enacted
racist, Fascist laws.  They were the State, they were the supreme
lawmakers, their Constitution was the supreme law of their land,
and unless we can appeal to some sort of independently existing
"Natural Law," by what standard are we to assert that the subjects
of Nazi rule were "entitled" to more rights than their rulers granted
them?

Farther east, Red, Soviet, Bol'shevik, totalitarian, Marxist-Leninist
Stalinists openly embraced G-dless, atheistic Communism, ridiculing
religion (_a la_ Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ") as the "opiate of
the people."  Jefferson's idea that men's "liberties are . . . the
gift of G-d" was totally alien to these Commies, as it is to their
present-day ideological "brothers in butchery," the slave-masters
of Red China and North Korea.  Their attitude, like that of Positivists
before them, was, "*we'll* decide what rights you're entitled to."

Men must never accept the idea that some agreement among men, some
piece of paper, is the "source of [their] freedom."  Rather, that
agreement, that piece of paper, that Constitution, is something 
set up to in order to *secure* the freedoms with which we are endowed
by our supernatural Creator.  Men must never let their freedoms be
run over, either by outright tyrant thugs or by intellectual elitists
looking to mold society in the image of some "dream."  As the good
Reverend preached at Cato's funeral:

   "It's no accident that we know we should not be run over.
    We are the royal family on the planet.  We're the original 
    man.  We gazed into the stars and wrote astrology.  We had
    a conversation and that became philosophy.  We are the ones
    who created mathematics.  We're not anybody to be left to 
    die waiting on an ambulance.  We are the alphas and omega 
    of creation itself.   . . .  We will win because we're right.
    We will will because we're strong.  G-d is on our side."


					-- Matt Rosenblatt
                                        (matt@amsaa.brl.mil)

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