RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ben Sasse is a United States Senator representing Nebraska. Before his election to the Senate in 2014, he served as president of Midland University, where he turned around a failing institution and made it one of the fastest-growing colleges in America. Senator Sasse holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, and a PhD from Yale. He and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas are stars of the GOP….RSK http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/04/the-american-idea-a-crisis.html

“We face great challenges at this moment in history. We face cyber threats. We face a resurgent Russia under Vladimir Putin. We face a jihadi threat. We face the growing threat of nonstate actors, who now can carry out massive attacks and are as able to play on the global stage as state actors. We face the exploding costs of our entitlement programs.

All these challenges are acute, but another dangerous trend is attracting less notice: The crisis of confidence in, and the growing unawareness of, the American idea.

What is the American idea? The American Founding made the bold claim that most peoples and most governments in the history of the world had been wrong about the nature of power and the nature of freedom. Sure, there were moments in history when certain city-states advanced some conception of liberty, but most people in human history said that might makes right: If you have a monopoly on power, you can do what you want. Everyone else in those societies was not a citizen but a dependent subject. If you lived in such a society, you needed the king to give you rights. The passive assumption was prohibition. The passive assumption was that if I want to start a business, I need a charter because it is illegal to run that business unless the king has sanctioned it. Therefore, I go and supplicate before the king in his court, and he decides whether to give me the right to start that business.

Today we would say that is bizarre. The voluntary transaction between two people is the very nature of freedom. The American Founders saw that denying people their freedom is fundamentally wrong because it does not comport with the dignity of people who are created in the image of God. People have been endowed with certain inalienable rights. God gives us those rights; government does not.

Government is merely a tool. It provides a framework for ordered liberty so that free people can live fully flowering lives.

This is why Ronald Reagan said that the American Founders “brought about the only true revolution that has ever taken place in man’s history.” Previous revolutions “simply exchanged one set of rulers for another set of rulers,” Reagan said. But America’s Founders did something different: They developed and fought for “the idea that you and I have within ourselves the God-given right and the ability to determine our own destiny.”

Founding FathersThink about how the framers of the Constitution wrestled with whether to enumerate any rights. What’s the danger in enumerating rights? Your list will never be long enough. The Constitution does not define any rights because the Constitution is the way that we give the government limited authority. All the powers that we do not give to the government are rights that we still retain. Even when the framers came up with the first ten amendments to the Constitution as a Bill of Rights, they could not decide on any one individual right to list first. They had to list five things in the First Amendment: religious liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to redress grievances. Those five freedoms are all listed as first freedoms because there is no way you can get the list complete.

Via Variety:

ESPN has fired Curt Schilling over his recent anti-transgender comments on social media.

Schilling, a baseball analyst for ESPN and former Red Sox pitcher, posted a Facebook comment criticizing a transgender women.

“A man is a man no matter what they call themselves,” read Schilling’s comment, which he apparently posted in response to a photo about a recent North Carolina law that restricts transgender people’s access to bathrooms and locker rooms. “I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”

ESPN issued a statement on Tuesday, saying “ESPN is an inclusive company. Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated.”

The State Department official who issued visas to many of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists is still employed by the federal government, according to J. Michael Springmann, the author of Visas for al-Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World.

Springmann, former head of the visa section at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, told PJM that Shayna Steinger approved 11 of the visas granted to the 19 9/11 hijackers. Fifteen received their visas at the Jeddah consulate.

Page 7 of the 9/11 Commission report states that “one consular officer issued visas to 11 of the 19 hijackers.” Those visas were reportedly approved between the years 1999 and 2001.

Springmann, an attorney who no longer works for the federal government, learned the State Department commissioned Steinger as a class four foreign service officer in 1999, which he said is “a high rank for someone hired just out of Columbia University with no prior experience.”

“Despite her issuing visas to terrorists and giving equivocal answers to the 9/11 Commission, Steinger is still an FSO,” Springmann wrote in his book.

She was appointed and confirmed by the Senate under the Clinton administration in 1999 as Shayna Steinger Singh in the Congressional Record, Volume 145.

Springmann said he was never given an official reason why he was fired by the State Department in 1991. He requested the documentation used to support the government’s decision but says he never received anything. To this day, he believes he was fired because he denied visas to individuals in Jeddah, Saudia Arabia, who submitted applications from 1987-1989 that raised red flags.

Our nation’s centuries-old commitment to free speech and religious liberty was already under threat. But it took men wanting to use women’s bathrooms and vice versa for the Left to truly show its hand, plainly and unequivocally declaring that American legal traditions should be set ablaze.

Yesterday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a “Statement Condemning Recent State Laws and Pending Proposals Targeting the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community” — a statement motivated by new Mississippi laws protecting religious freedom and by North Carolina’s much-discussed “bathroom law.” The Commission claims that any law requiring men and women to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex “jeopardizes not only the dignity, but also the actual physical safety, of transgender people whose appearances may not match societal expectations of the sex specified on their identification documents.”

While this is standard leftist rhetoric — notice it omits any concern for women and girls who will be exposed to male nudity and could be rendered more vulnerable to sexual predators — what follows is perhaps the clearest and most unequivocal statement of radical progressive legal philosophy I’ve ever read. It articulates three principles that, taken together, would render religious liberty permanently subordinate to the interests and demands of LGBT activists:

There is a growing obsession with death in what passes today for our culture. This would not be a disturbing trend were it simply a fringe phenomenon. But it is ubiquitous throughout the culture.

The first series I discuss here is “Dexter.” I have watched the whole series (seven seasons, from 2006 to 2013), but it was brought to my attention by Stephen Coughlin in his “Strategic Overview: Understanding the Threat & Strategic Incomprehension in the War on Terror,” p. 6, a synopsis of the salient points of Coughlin’s Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad. Coughlin writes in “Strategic Overview”:

From Catastrophic Failure [p. 34], “The “Dexter Standard,” was written to highlight the ridiculousness of the constraints placed on counterterrorism efforts to understand the nature of the threat. It argues there should be no controversy regarding analysis of a self-declared enemy’s self-identified warfighting doctrine and explains this through reference to the Showtime series Dexter. In the fall 2011 season, the plot revolved around a serial killer who acts in furtherance of an idiosyncratic End-Times scenario based on the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. Upon recognizing this, inspectors used Revelation as an essential analytical tool. The necessity of using Revelation was never questioned even as some inspectors were either nominally religious or non-believers. No one suggested that only Christian inspectors were qualified to investigate.

(I review in part Coughlin’s book in “Interfaith Bridges to Islam” on Rule of Reason.)

“Dexter” is Dexter Morgan, a forensic specialist in blood spatter analysis working for a fictive Miami police department. On the surface he is a calm, likeable fellow and gets along with most of his police colleagues. But, in secret, he is a serial killer. In fact, he is a homicidal maniac. He is a kind of vigilante who kills serial killers, and causes them to vanish. The bodies of his victims, each of whom is responsible for horrendous crimes and is ritually murdered by Dexter, are wrapped in plastic and dumped into the ocean. The problem with this, at least with me, is that once the serial killers have been “stopped,” no one knows what has happened to them and whether or not they are still at large and will strike again after a puzzling hiatus. Early in the series some of the bodies are discovered by a diving class. The unknown killer is instantly dubbed “The Bay Harbor Butcher.”

Their crimes are rarely solved by the police. The public is left in the dark about the status or demise of the killers. The police are left with big question marks. Dexter chooses not to enlighten them. He continues to analyze crime scenes and eliminate the serial killers.

My second problem with the series is that Dexter admits that he is homicidal. He likes killing killers. But his killing is done within the parameters of a “code” established by his father, a former (and now dead) policeman. This figure appears occasionally in flashbacks as a real character in the series, but mostly as a ghostly embodiment of a “conscience” with whom Dexter has an ongoing internal dialogue. This device is in addition to the intermittent voice-over narrative of Dexter.

Dexter confesses to an overwhelming urge to kill. He began as a child with animals and graduated to killing men (and some women, particularly the nurse who allegedly poisoned his ill father). It is something he says he cannot control. He is only at peace when he has killed someone. His father taught him everything he knows about tracking killers, capturing them, and finally dispatching them without leaving a single trace of himself or of the victim behind. He adheres to the “code” but sometimes questions his father’s wisdom, and sometimes his ghostly father questions his adopted son’s contemplated actions.

While all eyes are on both parties’ primaries, constitutional governance — liberty, popular sovereignty, and state power, those vital things the Constitution is supposed to shield from encroachment by the central government — continues to be shredded.

Two cases in point: President Obama’s pressure on the states to drop sanctions against Iran, and his continuing scheme to dictate immigration law unilaterally.

The invaluable Omri Ceren (citing a Bloomberg View report) alerts us that the State Department has sent monitory letters to the governors of all fifty states “suggesting” that they review any sanctions imposed against Iran. Over half the states have such sanctions, targeting not only Iran’s nuclear work but the regime’s other weapons work (e.g., ballistic missiles), terror promotion, human rights abuses, detention of Americans, etc.

Explains Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:

[These sanctions] are an essential part of the non-nuclear sanctions architecture designed to both deter Iranian illicit behavior and to safeguard pension funds from the risk associated with entering Iran’s economy.

Alas, any counter-Iranian measure with real teeth is certain to fly in the face of President Obama’s Iran deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. As I’ve recently recounted, the text of the JCPOA expressly indulges Iran’s position that it will “cease performing [its] commitments” under the deal if it deems the sanctions to have been “reinstated in whole of part.” That threat should only relate to sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program, but — as the Obama administration well knew — many of the sanctions against significant Iranian entities (e.g., the National Iranian Oil Company and Bank Melli) are based on activities in addition to support for the nuclear program.

The Obama administration’s immigration policies, including outrageous executive orders and other such directives, have hobbled all efforts at immigration law enforcement. “Surges” of unaccompanied minors across our nation’s southern border, the release of thousands of illegal aliens who have serious criminal convictions — for crimes of violence, including rape, weapons possession, drug offenses and even homicide — have made it clear that the term “immigration law enforcement” is now a virtual oxymoron.

Now the Obama administration, to the consternation of Americans across the United States, is preparing to admit at least 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States with less scrutiny than ever before. This was the focus of my April 15, 2016 article for FrontPage Magazine, “How Obama’s Refugee Policies Undermine National Security: Obama orders ‘shields down’ in the wake of a succession of deadly terror attacks.”

Furthermore, the huge quantities of heroin and cocaine present in towns and cities across our nation lay waste to the administration’s absurd lie that our borders have never been more secure.

On June 27, 2015, CAPS (Californians for Population Stabilization) posted my article, “Heroin Epidemic: The Real Metric for Determining Border Security.” In my judgment, the failures of our immigration system, while devastating to America and Americans, is actually a twisted “success story” for organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a laundry list of other organizations and individuals that are intent on flooding America with huge numbers of foreign workers, tourists and students to maximize profits at an extraordinary price: obliterating the “American Dream” and even, all too often, costing Americans their very lives.

Clearly the Obama administration has done more than any other administration to undermine the integrity of the immigration system and hobble any efforts at immigration law enforcement. The immigration crisis is a long time in the making. Indeed, prior administrations of both parties also bear responsibility for the immigration crisis that now threatens national security, public safety and the future of our nation and our citizens.

Diversity is a neutral term, no more positive or negative than its array of antonyms such as homogeneity and uniformity. Iraq is certainly diverse. So is Syria or the Balkans; Japan and South Korea are not. Yet uniformity seems a virtue in the latter while difference in the former has birthed tragedy.

In other words, diversity as a positive demographic idea depends on how it is manifested within a particular political landscape. In the U.S., diversity was traditionally a word less fondly used than unity. Our coins, after all, do not bear the motto E singulis plures. And the Confederacy failed in its effort to allow the states their own diverse cultures without yielding to federal unity. The German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was certainly one of the most diverse coalitions in history, the invaders eventually including, besides the Germans themselves, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, and Spaniards, in opposition to a mostly unified Soviet Red Army.

How, then, did diversity become the mantra of the American 21st century? A few reasons stand out.

First, during the 20th century the U.S. was steadily moving toward a multiracial, intermarried, integrated, and assimilated society. As a result, the 1960s idea of “affirmative action” had largely become played out after a half-century of canonized use; by the 2000s it was beset with a variety of class and racial paradoxes. The country was no longer the 90/10, white/black binary that dealt with the issues of the Civil Rights era.