Tammany Hall as a ferocious tiger killing democracy by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly.
“We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”
Dr. Samuel D. Burchard
Last week brought with it a couple of major events, neither one of them good for America. In the first place, there was the passage of the comically, propagandistically names Inflation Reduction Act, an Act guaranteed to increase, not decrease inflation. Not to mention an Act that sics 87,000 new IRS agents on the American people – more specifically, it sics them on the middle class and small businesses that don’t have the legions of tax lawyers and accountants to fight back against the IRS – an Act that implements parts of the liberty destroying, World Economic Forum, Vatican approved Green New Deal, and an Act that manages to extend Obamacare subsidies passed as part of Covid relief.
In short, it’s another unconstitutional boondoggle that will do exactly the opposite of what it claims it will do.
Then there’s the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. Many writers have rightly compared this raid to the sort of thing one would expect in a banana republic. Given the disturbing trend of both the Democrats generally, and the Biden Regime in particular, to politicize justice, this raid must be seen as a continuation of their attempts to outlaw their political opponents.
One can find many articles in the mainstream and even alternate conservative and libertarian press denouncing both the Inflation Reduction Act and the raid on Mar-a-Lago. But none of them, in this writer’s opinion, get to the heart of the matter.
Thousands of abortion-rights activists gather in front of the U.S. Supreme Court after the Court announced a ruling in the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case on June 24, 2022 in Washington, DC. The Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health overturns the landmark 50-year-old Roe v Wade case and erases a federal right to an abortion. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Chip Somodevilla, 2022 Getty Images)
With the release of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision on Friday, June 24, 2022, the reign of the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in all 50 states was overturned.
This was a decision Christians have long hoped for but one that at times seems far from ever coming to pass.
A great deal has been written on this topic over the past two days, and it is not my intention here to recap all of it. But despite the volume of commentary about abortion, there are, I think, some important topics that are touched on but rarely, if they are discussed at all. It is to these topics that I now turn.
Dobbs v. Jackson Does Not Outlaw Abortion
The Supreme Court’s decision does not outlaw abortion in America. What it does is remove the Constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion, a right not found in the Constitution at all, but one invented by the Court in 1973.
When the Constitution was written, the intention of the framers was to establish a federal government of enumerated powers. That is, the Constitution spelled out in detail the powers of the federal government. Apart from these enumerated powers, the federal government had no authority. The 10th Amendment puts it this way, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
The logic here is the same as the logic behind the Regulative Principle of Worship. God alone tells us in his Word how he is to be worshipped. If the Bible does not specifically sanction a worship activity, that activity is prohibited. In like fashion, if the Constitution does not specifically spell out a governmental function as belonging to the federal government, that function is prohibited to it, and is, “reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Following this line of thinking, we need to ask ourselves, does the Constitution have anything to say about abortion? This answer is, no it does not. Writing in Liberty Defined, Ron Paul noted,
[T]he Constitution says nothing about abortion, murder, manslaughter, or any other acts of violence. There are only four crimes listed in the Constitution: counterfeiting, piracy, treason, and slavery. Criminal and civil laws were deliberately left to the states.
Paul, Liberty Defined, 2
Those who believe the Supreme Court should ban all abortion in America likely are disappointed by the Dobbs ruling. For example, a tweet from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) read, “Following the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a patchwork of state laws means abortion access will vary widely depending on where someone lives.” But what some would call a “patchwork” is simply the result of our federal system of government. As much as Christians would like to see abortion banned in all 50 states, that is probably not a possibility at this time. Some areas of the nation take a more biblical view of abortion, and some will be less Christian in their thinking.
While Christians can pray and work for the day when abortion is banned in all 50 states, we can receive with thanks the Court’s ruling that holds out the promise that abortions will now be banned or severely restricted in some parts of the nation.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on July 16, 2021 (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members of one another.
Ephesians 4:25
“There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”
In the same speech, Obama went on to deny that he was calling for censorship, noting, “The answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say ‘this is reliable’ and I’m still able to argue safely abut facts and what we should do about it.”
Nearly five years later, it’s fair to say that quite obviously Obama and others of his political persuasion were talking about censorship, and this became clear enough last week that even the most ardent deniers of the big government/big tech censorship complex have not excuse for missing the Biden regime’s full-bore attack on the First Amendment.
In the same press conference, Psaki voiced her displeasure that Facebook was not deplatforming spreaders of “misinformation” fast enough for her, and presumably, for her boss’s tastes. She said, “there’s about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of the anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including Facebook – ones that Facebook owns.”
If all that wasn’t enough, Psaki was at it again the next day. In a Friday 7/17 press conference she offered that, “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not other if you – for providing misinformation out there.”
As the saying goes, I need new conspiracy theories, because all my old ones are coming true.
Seriously, people have speculated for years that the Deep State has been behind much, if not all, of the social media censorship. But this is right in your face government censorship. We have what is, in my opinion, an illegitimate government installed through election fraud stomping on the right of American’s to freely access information on a matter that affects all our lives.
Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens has written a most remarkable editorial in today’s New York Times. I hope to do a video on his piece later this week, but for now I’d like to share with you this pearl of wisdom from Stevens. He wrote, “For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation” (emphasis mine).
Well, I’m certainly no legal eagle. I’ve never so much as been to law school, let alone sat as judge on the highest court in the land. But for all that, I do understand the English language and I beg to different with Justice Stevens.
You see, there’s this little thing called the Second Amendment, and it reads
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed (emphasis mine).
Now my dictionary gives the following definition of infringe: “Violate, transgress, encroach.” For infringement it gives: “an encroaching or trespass on a right or privilege.”
To put in another way, the Second Amendment prohibits the Federal Government from violating, transgressing, encroaching, or limiting the right of the American people to keep and bear arms. Just what part of “shall not be infringed” does this addled former Justice not understand?
Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens has written a 
Lux Lucet 