Lux Lucet

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton at the first Presidential Debate, 9/26/16.

As is usually the case, there were more interesting headlines this past week than I could hope to write about. But even though there were a plethora of interesting stories, there were three that really stood out to me: the kickoff to the presidential debate season, new charges that the US is supporting terrorists in the Syrian civil war, and removal of Roy Moore from Alabama’s Supreme Court. Let’s take a look at them.

The Second Amendment, It’s Debatable

For all the hype surrounding the run-up to Monday’s presidential debate, you might be forgiving for thinking it was going to be a repeat of the Thrilla in Manilla. It was hardly that. But I must admit to being impressed with the pantsuited one’s command of her talking points. Especially in light of the fact that not too long ago she seemed almost mentally impaired, claiming to think the (c) markings in classified documents were paragraph references rather than indications that the documents were classified.

There has been a lot of commentary on the debate, and I have no intention of repeating it all here. But there is one issue that was raised during the proceedings that did catch my attention: both Hillary and the Donald, along with Barak Obama, are all for undermining the Second Amendment.

That seems hard to believe on the surface, but consider what Trump said Monday night during the debate, “I agree with you [Hillary Clinton], when a person is on a watch list or a no-fly list [they should not be able to purchase a gun].”

Banning individuals on the no-fly list or terror watch list from buying guns is one of those ideas that seems so common sense that no reasonable person could oppose it. But a little consideration shows just how dangerous an idea it is.

The most obvious problem with no fly, no buy legislation of the sort Obama, Clinton and Trump favor is that there is no due process involved. The government, using unknown criteria, simply assigns people to the no fly or terror watch list. This is arbitrary government and a disaster for anyone who cherishes our constitutionally protected liberties.

Charles C.W. Cooke stated the problems with no fly, no buy legislation very well in a Los Angeles Times
editorial when he wrote,

When [Senator Harry] Reid and his accomplices argue that nobody on the “terror watch list” should be permitted to buy a gun, they are saying in effect that the government should have the power to deprive you of your enumerated constitutional rights purely by entering your name into a database.

In that same editorial, Cooke notes that according to the ACLU “there are now 1 million names on the [terror watch] list. That’s 1 million people whom Obama, Clinton and Trump would deprive of their Second Amendment rights based on the whim of anonymous bureaucrats.

What is worse, the same logic could easily be applied to other enumerated constitutional rights. After all, you wouldn’t want someone on the terror watch list having the right to free speech. Why, he might go on Facebook and convince someone to join ISIS! And that’s just for starters.

Trump is clearly in the wrong on this issue, and constitutionally minded Americans need to point this out.

Global War On Terror?

Ever since 9/11, Americans have been constantly harangued about the so-called global war on terror. For over 15 years now, the federal government has convinced us that moving heaven and earth to combat terrorism wherever it may be found is critical to our security.

In the process, hundreds of thousands have died, a trillion of dollars have been spent, and the Constitution has been trashed (see above), and yet the CIA admits the number of terrorists in the world is, “a much larger number than we have seen previously.”

But as bad as this is, it’s not the half of it. You see, for some time now there has been good evidence that the US government actually has been supporting terrorists in Syria, including Al-Nusra (the Syrian franchise of Al-Qaeda) and ISIS.

For many people, at least for those who get their news only from the mainstream, this claim likely comes as a shock. But just this week there was another report linking the US to terrorist groups in Syria. The following is a summary of what an Al-Nusra commander told German reporter Jürgen Todenhöfer

• They [Al-Nusra] are supported by the US
  
• They received tanks and other heavy weaponry via Libya and Turkey
  
• They go officers and experts from the US, Israel, Turkey inside Aleppo [a terrorist held city holding out against the allied forces of the Syrian government and Russia]
  
• The commanders of IS [short for ISIS or the Islamic State] are led by Western intelligence
  
• They are against cease-fires and aid deliveries
  
• “The U.S. is on our side”
  

The Al-Nusra commander went on to say,”[T]he Islamic State has been used in accordance with the interest and political purposes of the big powers like America…Most of the IS leaders are working with intelligence services.”

So why on earth would the US could team up with ISIS and Al-Qaeda? The answer’s very simple. It’s a dirty little secret the mainstream press refuses to make clear to people. The US and the terrorists have a common goal in Syria.

And that common goal is the ouster of Bashar Assad as president of Syria.

Once the basic alignment of interests between the terrorists and the US is understood, many of the events in Syria that seem so confusing begin to make more sense.

For fifteen years Americans have been told that fighting terrorism is job one, yet now we find there is good evidence that the US, in fact, supports the very terrorist groups it claims it opposes.

MYOB is the biblical prescription for foreign policy. Had the US maintained the biblical foreign policy of its founders and stayed out of foreign wars and entangling alliances, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the absurd and immoral position of promoting radical Islamists to achieve a foreign policy goal which is really none of our business.

The “Ayatollah of Alabama”

I was going to close this week’s post with a commentary on the fall of Deutsche Bank and the danger it poses to the world financial system. Perhaps we can look at that another day.

But something else more important caught my eye this morning, the suspension of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore from the state’s Supreme Court. As the New York Times reports,

Nine months after instructing Alabama’s probate judges to defy federal court orders on same-sex marriage, Roy S. Moore, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was suspended on Friday for the remainder of his term for violating the state’s canon of judicial ethics.

Not surprisingly, critics of Moore have spent the past 24 hours taking a victory lap. Writing in Slate, Ashley Cleek asks “Can Alabama finally move on from a decade of controversy brewed by one man’s hate?”

Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, was especially scathing in his comments.

He [Moore] disgraced his office and undermined the integrity of the judiciary by putting his personal religious beliefs above his sworn duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

Moore was elected to be a judge, not a preacher. It’s something that he never seemed to understand. The people of Alabama who cherish the rule of law are not going to miss the Ayatollah of Alabama.

Secularists of Cohen’s ilk, who delight to denounce Christians for daring to impose their morality on society, ironically cannot see the log in their own eye, even as they themselves work day and night to impose their warped secular ethics on society.

The only true source of ethics – ethics is the philosophic discipline of correct behavior; it is the study of what men ought to do – is the Law of God. Specifically, the moral law as summarized in the Ten Commandments.

Why secular ethics may be imposed on society but Christian ethics may not, Cohen does not say. Most likely he would fall back on the studied misunderstanding of “the separation of church and state”, which deliberately misinterprets the Constitution as ruling out of court any ethics based on the Scriptures.

But the Constitution merely prohibits the federal government from establishing a state church, which is a good thing. It in no way prohibits Christian ethics from serving as the basis for civil law. And the refusal of Cohen and others to understand this simple distinction has gone far to bringing the US to the point where the our laws now call good evil and evil good.

And because of the exhaustive efforts he has put into bringing about this sorry state of affairs and imposing his own brand of anti-Christian ethics on the nation, I propose we dub Richard Cohen the Alabama Autocrat. It seems only fitting.

I’ll leave you with a quote from John Robbins, whose comments on imposing ethics are instructive. He wrote,

This brings us to a third issue, that of imposing beliefs. Christians have been scared to death by the pagans [Richard Cohen and the SPLC, for example] who argue that one must never impose one’s religious beliefs on others. Tell that to the 16 million American babies who have had the religious beliefs of seven old men on the Supreme Court imposed on them. In any civilized society, religious beliefs will be imposed; morality will be legislated. Civil law is nothing more than legislated morality (Abortion, the Christian, and the State).