"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." As a general rule, human behavior varies very little, within certain norms - fallen human nature's desires and fears are constant, so that "what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."
The first example is well-known by name, but its specifics are poorly understood. An understanding of its example, and how it applies to the battle liberty-minded Americans are fighting today, would not be amiss. The Fugitive Slave Act contained a number of provisions, but two in particular upset Abolitionists (and indeed all those who valued personal freedom). The first denied the right of those accused of being escaped slaves to trial by jury. This provoked a great deal of protest - and rightly so - but the second part is more relevant to our discussion. This required that magistrates and ordinary citizens in free states not only refrain from hiding escaped slaves, which was already illegal, but also actively work to capture and return escaped slaves. The law not only worked to prevent slaves from escaping, it attempted to force northern states into taking part in the brutal "peculiar institution" of the South.
Sixty-four years later, we face a similar situation. Not content with legalized - even, in some cases, taxpayer-funded - abortion, advocates for abortion insist that every business owner be forced to bloody his hands by providing funds to his employees specifically for the purpose of providing abortifacients (or, if he chooses an "exemption," he can pay someone else to do the exact same thing). It isn't enough that employees can already use their salary to buy abortifacients, the employer must provide compensation for that and no other purpose. Why? It isn't because of financial hardship - the abortifacients covered by the HHS mandate range from $30 to $60, and someone claiming financial hardship can get them from Planned Parenthood free of charge. Abortifacient drugs for early pregnancy are readily available and inexpensive - this, by the way, is a shameful indictment of the value our society places on life, but it is nonetheless true. No one is being prevented from using abortifacients because they can't afford them. At face value, it would appear that there is no particular reason to force employers to pay for these drugs, and yet that is exactly what the HHS mandate does. Again, why? Perhaps because "there is nothing new under the sun," and those who do evil are still afraid to do it alone. One person standing up for right is a threat to those who do wrong and a prod to their sore conscience. By forcing universal participation in their misdeeds, abortion's apologists apparently hope to wipe away every hint that abortion is a sickening affront to the dignity of humankind, just as slavery's apologists hoped to silence their consciences by silencing their opposition.
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." The particular circumstances may change, but we must continue to do the right thing, because fallen man will keep on doing the wrong thing. "New occasions teach new duties," to quote a rousing old abolitionist hymn, but right never changes.
In the aftermath of several prominent mass public shootings, a heated debate over gun control has arisen, and several restrictive policies have been proposed to limit gun ownership. The debate inevitably eventually lands on the nature of the Second Amendment's provision that the "right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Some voices, particularly political liberals, contend that the presence of the phrase "a well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state" is a limitation on those people who possess the "right of keep and bear arms" mentioned immediately after. Surprisingly, this argument is quite common, and is generally the first objection raised when the right to keep and bear arms is mentioned. It does not, however, stand up to scrutiny.
First, one should consider the context of the sentence itself. Here the bane of English students everywhere - diagramming - becomes a useful tool. By diagramming the sentence it is possible to determine what relationship the two parts of the amendment have to each other. The diagram below does so.
With this in mind, the amendment can be interpreted more clearly. To paraphrase, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, because - remember that the nominative absolute exists to explain the rest of the sentence - a well-regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state. When arranged in this manner it couldn't be more clear that the amendment refers to an individual right for all the people to bear arms (it should also be noted that "infringed" includes any form of limiting, so anything that limits the right to keep and bear arms in any way violates the Second Amendment).
The reader may remain unconvinced. If so, there is a way to test this interpretation. If this interpretation is correct, then the "militia" in question would refer to "the people" as a whole, and we would expect this fact to be reflected in what the authors of the Constitution had to say on the matter. As it happens, they had a great deal to say on the topic. First, think about what Patrick Henry - who, I'm sure, needs no introduction here - had to say:
“The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.”Consider also this quote from Richard Henry Lee, a member of the Continental Congress and signatory of the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.
"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves...and include all men capable of bearing arms."Lee apparently believed that the militia consisted of the entirety of the populace. If a clearer statement is desired, George Mason, the "Father of the Bill of Rights" was happy to oblige.
"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."Tench Coxe, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress gave his own description of what the militia was.
“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves?"Finally, James Madison, who drafted most of the Constitution, was also very clear about the correct nature of the militia.
"The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..."It seems abundantly obvious from the above quotes that the above interpretation of the Second Amendment - that is, that the reference to a militia is an explanation of why the people have the right to bear arms, not a limitation on the right to bear arms - is the correct one. The fact that a well-regulated (well-trained and equipped - note the similarity to the term "regular army," which referred to a professional, well-equipped army) militia is necessary is the reason that the people's right to keep and bear arms should not be infringed.
Therefore, the objection that the right to keep and bear arms is offered only to a select few militiamen is flatly contradicted by both historical and grammatical context. Further, the Second Amendment denies the government the ability to take any action to infringe on - in other words, to limit - the right to keep and bear arms. For this reason, unless the Constitution is discarded or amended, any action to limit the availability of firearms - gun control, as it is known today - is entirely unconstitutional. Few people sum the matter up better than Tench Coxe:
Finally, Patrick Henry, an early skeptic of the Constitution because he believed it did not provide enough protection for state and individual rights, covers the right to bear arms as a whole in his usual fiery style.
“Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American… [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.”
“Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in our possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?
The right to keep and bear arms is the right of the people. They have yielded it, in part (and unwisely), to both federal and state governments in order to create a standing army, however, the fact that the federal and state governments have such a right is no reason to infringe on the peoples' right to do the same. Any attempt to do so is both dangerous and unconstitutional, and should not be tolerated.
1973 brought a lot of things to America. That year we pulled out of Vietnam, leaving our South Vietnamese allies to face the Russian-backed North alone. Richard Nixon assured the country that he was not a crook. The World Trade Center became the tallest building in the world. The nerdier among us may mark it as the year Skylab, our first space station, was launched. Nothing that happened that year, however, had a greater impact than the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade on January 22 that abortion was a constitutionally protected right. With that ruling state laws across the country banning abortion were struck down, fundamentally changing the nation.
The decision in Roe v. Wade is troubling for a number of issues, some of them not even related to abortion. First, the court found a right to privacy in the Constitution not recognized by any scholar of that document. Certainly the Supreme Court, beginning in 1923, had actively reinterpreted the Constitution to extend the right to liberty found in the fourteenth amendment into a general right to privacy, but the 1973 decision expanded that effort massively. Chief Justice Douglas in Griswold v. Connecticut had found a right to privacy in the “emanations” and “penumbras” of other rights actually found in the Constitution. The district court that ruled in Roe v. Wade prior to the Supreme Court found that the right to privacy was derived from the ninth amendment. Justice Blackmun, in writing his opinion in Roe v. Wade expanded that right to privacy drastically and gave it a home in the fourteenth amendment.
Each possible source of a constitutional right to privacy, however, lacks substance. The argument from “emanations” and “penumbras” is a fairly obvious attempt to read something into the Constitution the founders' did not intend. The argument from the ninth amendment is also badly off the mark. The Constitution is a limit on national, not state, government. The fact that the Constitution does not “deny or disparage” rights not specifically protected does not in any way mean that the states cannot do so. If one were to make the argument that the ninth amendment limits the states no state could pass any law that limits the rights of any individual in any way, since all rights would be protected by the ninth amendment. This is obviously absurd. The argument from the fourteenth amendment is also flawed. Although the fourteenth amendment guarantees that no state can deprive any citizen of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” the wording clearly intends “life, liberty, or property” to mean the three forms of punishment possible: death, imprisonment, or fine. Once again, by making the argument that liberty is intended to apply to all forms of liberty one reaches an entirely untenable conclusion.
A greater flaw in the decision's reasoning lies in the age when the unborn child begins to be partially protected. According to the decision states cannot limit abortion in any way except to protect the life of the mother until the baby would be viable if delivered. The obvious implication is that life begins at viability. This lacks even basic common sense. While the decision, based on the ability of the medical community at that time, placed the line when viability began at twenty-eight weeks today fifty to seventy percent of babies born at twenty-four weeks survive. Even at twenty-three weeks thirty-five percent survive. Basing one's definition of what life should be protected on the viability of the child outside the womb thus places life entirely at the hands of technology. Fifty years ago keeping a child born at twenty-three weeks gestation alive would have been unimaginable. Today, although difficult, it is possible. One can imagine that similar advances will occur in the next fifty years, meaning that children who, according to Roe v. Wade, could not be protected by state law now would present little problem to the medical professionals of that time. To emphasis the absurdity of viability as a measure of the beginning of protected life a thought experiment could be useful. Imagine that a device capable of maintaining fetal viability beginning at fifteen weeks gestation was invented. The inventor, being a particularly greedy fellow, refused to reveal the plans or how the complex machine could be used before he was paid. Without a demonstration no company would pay for the eccentric genius's machine, so he died without revealing the secret of his invention. Now, are the unborn children at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, etc. weeks gestation alive in such a way that they should be protected? Should they be allowed to be protected by state law? After all, the equipment does exist to keep them alive outside the womb. On the other hand, no one is capable of actually using the equipment, so perhaps they shouldn't be protected. One could go on and imagine any number of situations in which fetal viability would be completely inadequate to mark the beginning of life.
This example, along with other objections to fetal viability as a measure of the beginning of protected life, merely highlights the problem: fetal viability has absolutely no relation to life. Arguing that an unborn child is not alive because it would not be viable outside the womb is exactly equivalent to arguing that you are not alive because you would not be viable if a maniac slammed an icepick through your head. One's future or potential state cannot, by definition, affect one's present state.
A simple rule of thumb is that if something is not considered to be characteristic of human life in adult humans it should not be considered to be the single mark of life in the unborn. That means that, since future and potential viability are not considered to be marks of humanity in the population at large, they should not be considered such in the unborn. Further, no one seriously believes that the ability to feel pain, cognizance, appearance, or the size of one's brain or other organs marks human life in the population at large, so it should not be the mark of life in the unborn. In reality, the one physical trait that is universally considered to mark a human being is the presence of a unique set of DNA. One cannot point to any other stage in the development of an unborn human when anything intrinsic to the nature of the child changes dramatically enough to warrant being considered to be the beginning of life.
Given that life logically must begin at conception, when all the information necessary for life is present, society, through government, has not only the right but also the duty to protect that right. First and foremost among government's tasks is the duty to protect life and implicit in that duty is the necessity of first defining life by the best means possible. Thus abortion is not, as many would have us believe, a private, personal choice beyond the reach of government intervention, it is, as we have seen, an attack on the most defenseless among us and as such is well within the purview of government. Even liberal Justice Blackmun admitted that if the unborn baby was a person it would “of course” be protected by the fourteenth amendment. This means that the unborn are protected by the fourteenth amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws, and Congress is authorized to pass appropriate legislation to enforce that protection. It is past high time that Congress and the American people shake off the Supreme Court's deadly foolishness by taking appropriate action to protect the rights of every person within the United States, born or unborn.
Recently some voices have taken to howling in disgust at the very idea that some parents might homeschool their children. Proponents of our spectacularly unsuccessful school system argue that parents aren't just unqualified, they don't even care enough to educate their children. They paint horrific pictures of children graduating from their homeschool barely being able to read, along with other frightening things, such as children being taught—horror of horrors—the Bible as part of their daily schooling.
This fear and loathing of homeschooling is nothing new. I have heard a philosophy professor I know proclaim in class that, obviously, no one could object to mandatory public education. Homeschooling has faced fierce opposition since its reemergence in the U.S. in the '70s, '80s, and into the '90s. This, however, was not how things were intended to be. America's founders did discuss the idea of compulsory education, but they rejected it with little debate. The fact is, it is a relatively modern idea that hirelings could even come close to the level of education parents could provide, coming to the U.S. in the 1850s by way of Massachusetts.
How has our distinctively modern education system turned out? Many have noted that U.S. students are falling behind the rest of the world rapidly, particularly in science and math. This education gap is beginning to affect geopolitical situation. Countries like China and Japan, that have not experienced the same decline in science education that America has, have started to challenge and even overtake the U.S. economically. Teachers scream that the problem lies in funding, that if they were only given more money they could make it work. Unfortunately, the solution does not lie in something as simple as throwing money at the problem. We spend about as much per year on education as the next seven biggest spending countries combined. Accounting for the number of students involved, currently the U.S. spends about $7,743 per student per year. The United Kingdom sits in second at $5,834, Australia takes third with $5,766, Canada spends $5,749, and Finland rounds out the top five with $5,653. In other words, we spend a lot more per student than anyone else (133% of what the runner-up spends per student) and we produce a lesser product. In fact, there is little correlation between expenditures per student and test scores and literacy rates. Countries like Sweden, which ranks fifth in money spent per student, ranks first in literacy rates, first in math test scores, and first in science test scores, jump over the bigger spenders. Even Russia has a higher literacy rate that the U.S.! More money simply will not fix the problem.
The problem is deeply ingrained in the system itself. In the past homeschooling and similar methods were recognized as the best way to produce intelligent, well-educated people. The shift to government education was not based on quality of education, but ideology. In the U.S., public education was intended to meld immigrants into American culture. Above all else, including quality of education, it was to produce a uniform product—uniformly good, it was hoped, but uniform in any case. Nor has public education as a form of indoctrination been limited to the U.S.. Hitler and the Nazis in Germany made public schooling mandatory and cracked down on parents who attempted to educate their children at home. Hitler even went so far as to say “When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'” His laws requiring public schooling were explicitly ideological in nature, an overt recognition that the hand that rocks the cradle, as the saying goes, rules the world.
All of this, however, does nothing to meet the new objections to homeschooling: that it cannot possibly provide the kind of education that the trained professionals in the public education system do. After all, homeschoolers spend on average, according to the most reliable estimates, only $500 per student per year (and I know from personal experience that it can be done for much, much less). How can underfunded and overworked parents provide a better education than well trained teachers with the massive well of deficit spending behind them? To put it bluntly, I have no idea—but they do. Homeschoolers score, on average, 30-40 percentage points higher on standardized tests than public and private schooled students. That number is nothing less than stunning. Parents, spending less than 10% what the government does, not only beat government and private schools, they beat them by an enormous margin. In a country plunging further and further into debt, this is the ultimate example of doing more with less. It is simply the best form of education, bar none.
So why do some still oppose it? Perhaps they are uniformed or unintelligent—one can never go too far wrong crediting a population with a large degree of stupidity. Remember, though, that in the past very few have supported public education to provide a better educational product. Instead, the goal has been to eliminate an unfortunate minority, one that the majority, or at least those in power, wishes would go away. Only time will tell whether the goal of those advocating public education here in America is the same.