Justice

What is justice?

Plato said justice is one of four cardinal virtues, the proper balance between self-interest and the rights or needs of others. The other virtues are prudence, temperance, and courage. These are civic, not moral, virtues.

Justice is usually portrayed as a woman holding a balance scale. A balance scale can only determine whether the weight of the two sides is equal or unequal. If the weights on one side are calibrated, we can know the weight of the other side, and then only if the scale is balanced. This is an interesting analogy to the concept of civic justice.

We have broad axioms about self-interest and the rights or needs of others. Free speech does not include the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater when there is none. My freedom to swing my fist stops at the tip of your nose. When we examine the matters that come before the United States Supreme Court, these axioms shed little light. The stakes when comparing an individual or group's self-interest are not easily compared to the rights or needs of the "others" on the opposite side of the scale. That is why we depend on equal administration of the law for the foundation of civic justice.

The justices of the Supreme Court are authorized by Article III of the Constitution to hold their offices during "good Behaviour" as an appellate court for matters of fact and law, with few exceptions (when they can be the original venue, or in cases of impeachment), and subject to the regulation of Congress. We are told the decisions of this court are "the supreme law of the land," but you will not find this intent in the Constitution or the deliberative papers at the time of its adoption. The Supreme Court was designed to be a co-equal branch to Congress and the Executive, and the final decider of facts at issue and interpreter of laws in light of the Constitution. Chief Justice Marshall arrogated more authority to the Court, and Congress has yet to undo his error.

By their very title, justices of the Supreme Court embody the civic virtue of justice. To determine the fair and proper balance between one party's self-interest and the rights and needs of others, the justices must act impartially, in full knowledge of the facts at issue and the applicable laws, and without influence from the wealth, poverty, privilege, low estate, or other attribute of the parties. That may be why modern depictions of justice are blindfolded.

The continued health of our nation depends on the Court's role in preserving the rule of law instead of the rule of men. Only if the law is the basis of deciding between outcomes in the courts can the governed have confidence in government. To the extent the law becomes the servant of men, the government becomes fickle, untrustworthy, and a potential enemy of the common welfare of citizens. A Justice of the Supreme Court who substitutes personal perspective about outcomes or foreign legal opinion for the laws of the United States betrays his oath of office. A little departure from fidelity to the law begets a little distrust and disregard. Think of the national evasion of the 55 mph speed limit in the 1970s, or the commonplace violations of Prohibition. A large departure from fidelity to the law begets lawlessness, tyranny, and ultimately revolution.

Shortly after adoption of the Constitution, the government of the United States fell into the hands of professional politicians. The self-interest of these politicians leads them to view the apparatus of government through a prism of outcomes rather than principles - quite foreign to the intention of the nation's founders. Increasingly, politicians see the relationship between outcomes and their continued electoral success. If they tilt the playing field to favor a group of voters, they expect those voters to retain the politicians in office. If they stay true to the nation's founding principles, those voters may choose another politician who promises to serve the particular voters' interests over the common good. We know this as "identity politics." Politicians are far too clever to confess this aloud - rather, they claim that tilting the playing field to favor some is actually an effort to be fair to all.

With the growth of government in the 20th Century, the unhindered ability of politicians to secure reelection by ignoring the Constitution produced awesome distortions and expansion of political power. The courts become political, too, and many judges have legislated from the bench. The outcome of Brown v. Board of Education, however desirable, is not supported by law-based findings of the Supreme Court. Read the decision. The outcome of Roe v. Wade, however undesirable, is similarly rootless, torturing an earlier whole-cloth invention of a right to privacy that is found nowhere in the Constitution.

Little wonder, then, that presidents, the Senate, and the press view the appointment and confirmation of Supreme Court justices and inferior court judges through a political prism.

The current president has made a career of telling us in calm, measured tones just how unjust our nation has been to the poor and downtrodden at home and abroad. He has nominated a candidate for the Supreme Court who shares those views and is willing to act on them. This particular candidate is on record that the right to keep and bear arms - though confirmed by the Supreme Court to be an individual right - may be restricted by the states. It seems she has not yet read Amendments IX and X to the Constitution. She has made overtly racist statements claiming superior ability to dispense justice based on her race and social origin. She has stated that courts make public policy. She is clearly aligned with President Obama in her views.

The Supreme Court is no place for a justice with such publicly announced disregard for the obligations of a judge. A nominee merits lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land only after demonstrating:

1. knowledge of and fidelity to the Constitution;
   
2. a record of faithfully examining case facts and applicable law, then ruling impartially based on the evidence in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the nation; and
   
3. clarity of argument and communication in service of justice in the United States.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor fails on all three counts.

Despite her manifest unfitness for the job, it is likely that Senate politics will lead to Judge Sotomayor's confirmation. Most Democrat senators want President Obama to triumph on any matter that will not harm their personal chances of reelection. Long ago, most Republican senators also shed their allegiance to the Constitution for political expediency. It is vain to hope that the Senate will suddenly waken to the need to limit the national government to its Constitutional role, much less insist that they and others in government behave with the humility the founders expected.

So we must take comfort that Judge Sotomayor is a less effective a proponent of President Obama's malicious doctrine than other potential nominees for the post. With God's help, the nation will have turned on President Obama before his next opportunity to nominate a justice, and we will be spared another, more effective voice for statist, secular humanist fascism.

Memory

Wouldn't it be great if Americans spent the Memorial Day weekend remembering those who sacrificed for our freedom?

For a little background on this particular observance, visit http://www.usmemorialday.org/backgrnd.html. It's great to thank God for our noble forbears who sacrificed so much for us. They preserved not only our freedom, but also liberated tens of millions around the world. They ended slavery in the United States and in many occupied lands.

My father and my next older brother served this country in time of war. Neither of these men sought careers in the military - they would gladly have avoided service. They were like most men who have fought for our nation - reluctant.

My father was a combat correspondent in the US Marine Corps and made three invasions during World War II, including Okinawa. He joined the Marines when "his number was up" in the draft, and used his skill in photography to win a berth in a service he preferred. He spoke little about his time in the Marines, but he won a citation from the Navy Department for his work, and you have probably seen his film. You see, the Marines had color movie film, and he shot a great deal of spectacular combat footage. Until budgets and computer graphics permitted another approach, many war films used combat footage from men like my father. My dad took a low-paying civil service job during the Korean War to avoid a return engagement. With three little boys, he just couldn't give Uncle Sam more than three years in combat.

My older brother joined the Army and attended Officer Candidate School, because his effort to join the Peace Corps to avoid military service during the Viet Nam War didn't work out. After billets around the world, he got sent to Saigon and commanded a truck company. He, too, said very little about his time in the war zone.

One of my junior high school classmates died on the USS Liberty in the Six Days War on June 8, 1967. His loss was part of the amazingly small minority of American warriors who die in action. Many more are wounded and continue to pay with their personal sacrifice until they reach the end of their days.

Both my father and my brother have gone home to God, passing away many years after they ended their military service. This is the normal cycle of events for Americans who serve in war. My schoolmates had fathers who flew bombers, served in the Signal Corps, were quartermasters in Australia, and so on. Millions of American men and women served honorably to defend our nation in war and in peace, and returned to America to live out their lives with the rest of us, fortunate to be free in a world that is far better for their efforts.

When you pick up the tab at the airport Starbucks for the uniformed soldiers in line ahead of you, or make your contributions to the many worthy charities that help them and their families, what a tiny repayment you make for the work they do.

Here is a pitifully incomplete list of places you can put in a helping hand:

Air Force Aid Society
Coast Guard Foundation
National Military Family Association
Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society
Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation
USO
Wounded Warrior Project

On Monday, May 25, 2009, flag etiquette calls for us to fly the flag at half staff until noon, then raise it fully.

That flag flies over the only land our nation claims in countries around the world where Americans have given the last, full measure of sacrifice for the freedom of complete strangers - our military cemeteries. It also flies over cemeteries here at home where the honored dead bear testament to the willingness of this great nation to rescue those who cannot survive without our help. It flies over court houses and legislatures where Americans have for more than two centuries governed themselves by mutual consent. It flies over schools, where the future of the nation rests on the lessons being learned. It flies on the moon, where the only nation on earth that ever landed human beings and brought them home again visited in peace.

Oh, how I pray on this Memorial Day that the flag may continue to fly over a free land! How I fear it will not! It would be an incalculable tragedy for all the sacrifice made by so many millions of uniformed soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and coast guardsmen to be squandered by the current generation of Americans.

Do not let the great work of so many men and women living and dead be lost to the usurpers who would steal your freedom, cheat your children of their inheritance, and surrender our culture to vandals from abroad. Stand up for the freedom we knew not so long ago, and turn these sorry wretches out of office. Start with your municipal elections this fall. Make them a referendum on freedom. Send the politically correct, tax-and-spend progressives packing. Don't elect school board members who celebrate "winter holiday" instead of Christmas. Don't approve of school books that revise American history. Continue in 2010 to the state and federal elections to support only those who believe in your freedom. Vote with your pocketbook. Contribute to the campaigns of honest Americans who want only those who follow the law to live here, and who want the law to follow the Constitution.

Let us on Memorial Day thank God for the sacrifices that our loved ones, living and dead, have made for our nation through military service. And let us dedicate our lives to preserving the heritage they served to defend.

Virtue

I had an interesting discussion with an experienced university professor the other night. He knew with absolute certainty that he was right about many topics: He makes no charitable contributions, because since not everyone may be relied upon the be virtuous only the state should provide charity. He is certain that Ronald Reagan was an idiot and that the Soviet Union collapsed of its own internal failings. Jesus Christ is a myth to this learned man. National Health is an unalloyed blessing to Great Britain and all its clients receive excellent care. Those who earn more should pay a larger share of their earnings in tax, because it is most fair. I am relieved to report we did not discuss former President George W. Bush. He holds these views with - shall we say - religious fervor. He is virtuous.

The root of virtue is a Latin word for manly strength. Through the miracle of common use, the word has become emblematic of moral excellence. We accomplish something by virtue of some attribute or behavior, and the virtue in this case means through the strength of that attribute or behavior.

Notably, strength is neither innately good nor bad. "He robbed the widow by virtue of his cupidity and her naivete." "He built a charitable foundation by virtue of his communication skills and the nobility of its cause." Virtue is apt in both examples.

Inasmuch as I believe with equal certainty: that taxation is theft and should only be permitted for the fewest reasons imaginable; that our Savior commanded us to share with the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the sick, and the imprisoned - and not through taxation but through personal volition; that President Reagan authored the collapse of the Soviet Union by announcing defense build-ups while causing the price of petroleum (the Soviet Union's principal cash export) to fall in a deal with the Saudi Arabian king; that Jesus Christ is the son of God who died that all may be freed of sin and spend eternity in heaven if only they repent and accept His grace; that socialized medicine is structurally incapable of providing decent health care over the long term because human nature and economic principles make this impossible; and that only taxes levied uniformly on all who consume are just... you may conclude I do not share the views of the learned professor.

Our conversation led to no moderation in the views of either participant. We are both virtuous. We both hold strongly to our views, and each considers his views morally superior. We also had a moderate observer who congratulated himself on his personal virtue: not having a strongly held view on these topics.

From this condition stems the great hazard of our nation at this very difficult moment. Led by a man with no moral compass other than the drive for personal power and a feel-good intent to get even with all those dead and living white men who stole our national weal from the deserving downtrodden, most Americans do not take seriously the peril we face every day when we are dissuaded from speaking up about our rights, and about right and wrong. With the national government so strong it can take giant corporations away from their owners with scarcely a whimper of protest, so omnipresent that no personal slight in the workplace is so small that your offended co-worker cannot have your job for your offense, with the public square dominated by those who will not countenance the thought that the medieval pagans who worship the moon god and follow a false prophet constitute a physical threat to the well-being of Americans, and who think the human race can somehow alter the earth's climate, is it any wonder we think virtue has become vice?

Vice is fault, pure and simple. It is something that does not work. It is like homosexual sex, which cannot result in procreation and may result in disease. It is like theft, which deprives the victim and debases the perpetrator. It is like lying, which often harms someone and morally corrupts the liar. It is like envy, which cheapens the envious and may lead to harm of the envied. All these behaviors do not work. At the very least, they harm the one who performs the act.

I marvel at generations of clergy who have labored to educate their flocks about the difference between virtue and vice. At the core of their mission rests the need to inculcate faith. The choice of the flock to believe ultimately rests not on being convinced by logic or example, but on the willingness of the believer to hope for the unseen, and to act on trust in the truth of that which cannot be proven.

In a sense, their mission is akin to the role of an elementary school teacher, a college professor, or a community organizer. We believe that 2+2=4 (in an appropriate base system). We believe that Washington accepted the sword from Cornwallis at Yorktown to end the American Revolutionary War. And the president believes that any position that accretes power to his purpose is sound. Each of these beliefs is attained through repetition, through the absence of disproof, and by effectiveness, but in the end they remain beliefs.

If we are to restore the right in America, we must speak forcefully to our neighbors about our beliefs, about the truth of the virtues that made this a great nation. We must argue that God gave America an exceptional role in the world, and that we cannot shirk our duty without great risk. We must not be constrained by political correctness that tolerates only the views of a vocal, secular humanist minority that rules the public square today. We must resist the siren song of moral equivalence. We must say, "I support your right to voice your view, but don't expect me to agree or go along with you."

It is vital to speak up. We live in an echo chamber that denies the holiness of God, the sovereignty of contract, the rights of property owners, and our heritage as Americans. Only if our voices drown theirs out will we stem their advance. You may recall that scene in Casablanca when Paul Henried leads the patrons of Rick's Cafe Americain in singing Le Marseillaise. They drowned out the German soldiers who were singing their patriotic song. The scene showed the moral superiority of the resistance leader, and the threat that resistance posed to the occupying power.

We are the resistance, and our nation is occupied by power-hungry secular humanists who deny God and worship a false god of progressivism. These occupiers have no interest in your personal freedom, only in their ability to force you to behave as they see fit. They are offended by your belief in the freedom that lets them act as they will without forcing you to match their behavior.

Stand up for the right, or be consigned to slavery. Your virtue will be its own reward, when you join the resistance that defends our American tradition.

May God bless you, and may He also bless the United States of America.

Just Law

The United States of America were founded to be a nation governed by law, not by the will of man. That is the essence of the revolution Americans fought against George III of England. Usurpation of God's law by man is always evil, and the founders risked everything to restore the good on American soil.

What did they say was the source of the law that would govern our new nation?

In the Declaration of Independence, Congress claimed the right to assume the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, recognized that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and appealed to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions.

In the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the signers acknowledged it "hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in Congress" to adopt those articles. That perpetual union lasted only eight years, until the United States were to be governed by the Constitution and its amendments.

In the Bill of Rights, the States agreed that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

There was a great deal of discussion about the nature of God's provision for the new nation.

Among the most inestimable of our blessings, also, is that... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

Thomas Jefferson - 1807

It is hard to find in the historic record a claim that the government was instituted to grant powers to mankind that originated from a source other than the Creator. It is also hard to find in the struggle that our nation waged to end slavery a claim that the rights of those persons - and they were always persons under the Constitution and laws of the United States - derived from the laws of man. It is quite easy to find appeals to justice for slaves that rest, not on the role of government in granting rights to citizens of the United States, but on the freedom God ordained for man as recorded in Genesis.

Now we are engaged in a struggle in this land over the law: whether laws should conform to God's will, or to the will of man. Since the Progressives took the helm of this nation a century ago, the law has moved inexorably to defile the right, to ignore the Constitution, and to empower the vagaries of human conscience in preference to the will of God. Congress, many presidents, and countless judges have set aside the reasoned and enlightened direction of our founders to build a regime of laws that bears no resemblance to the structure our founders created.

It isn't just that the past century of abuse has yielded a huge government leviathan, it isn't merely that states have seen their lawful authority looted by Congress and the courts, and it isn't only that individuals have been hemmed in by laws, regulations, and fear. The saddest result is that the nation has become a morass of amoral and immoral standards and laws, and that men rule in lieu of the law.

Sadly, the charlatans who love the current state of the law and society are the men who bend the law to their will. They are joined by compatriots to their perverse world view who deny the history of our nation and claim for themselves the right to shape our society to their Godless views. They have owned the academy for more than four decades, they have polluted two generations with secular humanism, they have lobbied for laws and practices that our grandparents would know are profoundly un-American.

And our chief charlatan, elected by a bare majority of the voters last November, cares not at all for the law as written, but instead for his power to push our society even farther away from its just framework to enforce his personal vision of justice. His vision has many precursors: environmental justice; amnesty for foreign national invaders; political correctness; the homosexual agenda; Islamic cultural equivalence; and labor superiority over capital and management. His anodyne tone and skill in inflecting when he reads from the TelePrompTer won over the product of two generations of cultural deracination, abetted by a tired and corrupt opposing party that has for decades offered up the same, but less, to a jaded electorate.

Our very freedom is in grave peril. And with that freedom, our souls are also at risk. We must be in this world, but we cannot allow ourselves to be of this world. We must honor the commandments of our Lord and Creator, and follow His revealed word. No person should be compelled to participate in the murder of an unborn, no person should be compelled to condone the pretense that living a homosexual life follows God's law, no person should be compelled to sacrifice freedom to operate a restaurant, a hotel, or a professional practice. While we live with the threat of losing what freedom we have left, we walk a tightrope on which merely acting on our belief in God and the freedom He ordained for us risks our future, merely for obeying His will.

That risk is the very one the founders took when they threw off the oppression of George III. They very nearly lost, and they paid dearly for our freedom - the freedom that has been so eroded over the last century. Are we made of the same stuff as those great men?

Fools

Fools value material things. They value things they take and things they earn. Yet, amidst their riches, they lack fulfillment. By contrast, the richest among us are the poor in spirit. They love their Creator, and they know they cannot earn the Creator's love. They know the Creator gave them life, gave them liberty, and gave them the right to serve by choice.

From Jeremiah Chapter 17:

5 Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.
6 For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.
7 Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is.
8 For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.
9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
10 I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.
11 As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.

(King James Version)

What do you think? Will their new owners make General Motors and Chrysler to be as a tree planted by the waters and never cease yielding fruit? Or shall they leave those riches in the midst of their days and at the end be fools?

If you are President Obama, you may think the companies will prosper because the new owners really earned their shares ... that the rightful ownership of these companies vests not with the stockholders and investors who provided capital for their facilities and operations, but rather with the laborers who were paid to make the cars (and are still paid long after they stopped making cars).

I do not share this view. I am confident the companies shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. There are many reasons for this.

• Foremost, what the President did is unjust; it strains the law to achieve an end he will not declare - to take ownership of these companies from their investors and creditors and transfer it to his patrons - organized labor.
  
• Second, these transfers will bypass the good that would have come from reorganization in bankruptcy court, particularly in not voiding insupportable labor agreements that make legacy US manufacturers less competitive than foreign manufacturers that make cars in the US.
  
• Third, the companies will be told by government to make vehicles that buyers in the US have shown they do not want. This arises from the left's devotion to the folly that government mandated change from fossil fuel powered automobiles will influence the world's climate.
• Fourth, "easy come; easy go." Those who did not earn what they have do not keep it.

In just over three months of presidency, our Dear Leader has intimidated banks, bondholders, corporate executives and boards, and investors to embrace moral bankruptcy through some of the most outrageous transfers of wealth in history. He has colluded with Congress and the executive branch to debase our currency and to spend vast sums we do not have. He has pretended to listen to those who oppose his statist agenda, only to co-opt them and to misrepresent their views with the connivance of a media that shares his extreme views. He has set in motion forces that will impoverish not only our nation but the world. He has not been alone, but rather stands on the shoulders of thousands of moral pygmies that claim the right to take from you in order to give to others.

I dare say that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin would scarcely recognize the nation that elected Barack Obama president. They first tried to form a government of confederated states, and then settled on a federal republic. They never imagined a Department of Agriculture, a Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a Department of Housing and Urban Development, an Environmental Protection Agency, nor a Department of Energy. Not once did they think the Interstate Commerce clause would be tortured into the right to tell a farmer that doesn't sell outside his home county what to grow. Imagine their views of WIC, Food Stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Prescription Drug Benefits, No Child Left Behind, Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards, or the progressive taxation of personal income!

The founders of our republic went to war against a king who was far less intrusive in their lives than our national government. They risked their fortunes, their names, and their lives in order to free their fellow Americans from tyranny much less oppressive than we endure today. Truly, Americans voted into office the knaves who created the treacherous government leviathan, and Americans remained complacent when our institutions were perverted by secular humanists and statists. Americans tolerated a Supreme Court that has arrogated itself above its coequal branches of government. Americans accepted laws that extend far beyond the limits of the Constitution. Americans allowed our schools to revise our history and teach our children values alien to our culture. Americans tolerate more than 10 million foreign nationals who have invaded our nation against our laws.

Will Americans take back this great land? Have we the courage to expel every one of these usurpers? Or, are we the fools who, not loving our God-given heritage, allow it to slip out of sight, living our twilight years in a nation that belies the virtues of its very foundation?

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, "Peace! Peace!" -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Patrick Henry - March 23, 1775