Paul Weyrich’s Final Two Warnings to America

Paul Weyrich, who died Thursday, was buried yesterday.

There are two warnings he has left for those who believe that this country must return to its roots as it faces the moral, legal, financial, and defense-related challenges ahead.

The first, the far briefer of the two, was published yesterday at the Free Congress Foundation web site. I have taken the liberty of converting it to a web-ready format and put it up here at my web host. It relates to protecting prolife professionals in the medical community from being forced to do things that violate their prolife beliefs:

….. (Barack Obama has) said he will propose FOCA (Freedom Of Choice Act), which would eliminate all State and Federal restrictions upon abortion. It would purport to force Christian hospitals to perform abortions or close. It would demand that physicians perform abortions or give up their practice.

Whatever happened to freedom of conscience? A hallmark of professionalism in the United States has been that we never force anyone to violate his or her conscience in the performance of a duty. That is the first line of defense of the pro-life movement.

….. Counting the votes, I doubt that there are enough pro-lifers in Congress to maintain the restrictions previously passed by Congress. However, even honest liberals would favor allowing a physician to practice medicine consistent with his or her life-saving principles of conscience. Most Republicans, as well as many Democrats, ran as pro-lifers in the 2008 election. This fundamental issue may become the first test of their commitment to life. If we force hospitals and physicians to perform abortions against their beliefs, in other words in violation of their conscience, then we will be on a downward spiral from which there may be no return.

This will be a test, America. God help all of us.

Weyrich’s longer warning, “History and the Judiciary,” published in July at UndergroundJournal.net and other sites where he was syndicated, explains in a sense how we got to the precipice of a point where, plainly spoken, a group of people acting as tyrants can force professionals to choose between staying in their chosen profession or violating their belief in the sanctity of human life.

The column should be seen as a clarion call for a new brand of constitutional activism.

The need for it only dawned on Weyrich late in his life.

Mostly unwittingly, I sensed in May of 2005 that the social “conservatives” who pushed George Bush over the finish line in 2000 and 2004 had lost their moorings. The realization that all was far from well hit me between the eye in May of that year, when I learned that James Dobson had endorsed an objectively unqualified man, Bob McEwen, for Congress in “my” district (OH-02). In short order, I learned that several other supposed leading lights of social conservatism (Weyrich, Don Wildmon, Tony Perkins, and several others) had done the same.

McEwen lost his bid that year, but tried again (and failed, thankfully) for the same seat in the Spring 2006 primary. Even when he was shown to have illegally voted absentee in Ohio for at least a half-dozen years while a resident of Virginia (and NOT a legal resident of Ohio), the same cadre of so-called evangelicals clung to their endorsements of him. I wanted to chalk it up to personal friendships these men had, and probably still have, with McEwen.

But in late 2007, I ran out of excuses I could make for them, when they endorsed in most cases, and lodged no meaningful objections in others, the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney. Weyrich was among them; months before his death, he said that doing so was the biggest mistake he ever made.

As to the others — Perhaps someday we’ll know how much money was involved in turning these people, all of whom supposedly strongly oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage, into endorsers of the one man who did more to “legitimize” it (but not actually legalize it; same-sex marriage is still illegal in every state in the union) than any other single person in America. But I’ll suggest that if there was any, it didn’t take much, because what these people are really after is having access to whomever happens to be in power. If that meant backing a person who lied about the abortion record of Ronald Reagan; who proactively, illegally, and unconstitutionally implemented the Massachusett’s same-sex marriage court opinion (Goodridge) instead of demanding that the legislature pass a law first; who implemented a state-run health care plan that subsidized abortions; and who forced Catholic Charities in Massachusetts out of involvement with adoptions by insisting that the organization violate its conscience and place children with same-sex couples — well, that was a price worth paying.

Weyrich’s column is a realization that many of his colleagues had gone down the wrong road — some inadvertently and with good intentions, and others not so much. Articulating this realization required the help of John Haskins, who operates UndergroundJournal.net. I was privy to some of the e-mails and aware of others that were involved in having John essentially ghostwrite, but with Weyrich’s ultimate approval, “History and the Judiciary.” It was painful for Weyrich to acknowledge that much of conservative strategy has been ineffectual for decades. Thus, his column is a call to constitutionalists to insist that from now on the game be played by our Founding Fathers’ rules, not the arbitrary rules of the elites. If the people we are sending to Washington want to keep playing the losers’ game, we have to keep working until we find people who are willing to fight and win.

That is what we must do. That is what so-called “conservative” leaders haven’t done. It is why there either needs to be new leaders, or the old ones have to understand what’s at stake, what has been done wrong, and get on the correct path.

The first 1/3 of Weyrich’s/John’s column follows after the jump; the rest is here at UndergroundJournal.net.

__________________________________________

History and the Judiciary

I am neither an attorney nor an expert in Constitutional law. Others have been good enough to say I am a good strategist. If so, then I would like to share my perspective of the current state of the judiciary. I have listened as a debate is occurring over the proper powers of the courts and the tendency of some Americans to cede to the advocates of unrestrained judicial power victories to which they are not entitled.

I am occasionally referred to as a “founder of the modern conservative movement.” Such an honor places upon me and others to whom such a description applies a special duty to warn our fellow citizens. Americans today are witnesses to the realization of the great fear of our Founding Fathers: the passing away of government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as President Abraham Lincoln stated, in the United States of America. With respect to the courts, we need a revival of the rule of law based upon the constitutional principles laid down by those who founded this nation.

Our forefathers gave their lives to liberate us from the rule of a British Parliament unelected by the American colonists:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism , it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…. (Emphasis added.)

The grand formalities of American election rituals hide a glaring fact: Americans can no longer claim that we are our own rulers in every circumstance in which we are empowered to be. Regardless of our votes, the defining judgments in our collective and personal destinies often are made by persons whom the American people have not elected to rule.

We gave judges their robes and gavels so that they might resolve specific disputes between specific plaintiffs and defendants. We never gave them authority to issue commands to our elected lawmakers, forcing us down roads which we have not chosen to travel. Judges have no constitutional authority to make laws or to amend our national and state constitutions. They have no authority to redefine words and concepts in our laws to mean what they and their ideological partisans wish for them to mean.

To Americans of previous generations this was obvious and fundamental. But for many in America today, this is meaningless, a mere technicality: judges are supreme because, well, because they just are.

When several judges opined that there ought to be no more prayer in American schools, lawyers, politicians and journalists told us that after three centuries of prayer in our schools, judges had suddenly “outlawed” it. Court opinions interpreting law and social custom magically became the law itself.

After three centuries of Americans exercising their right to control their communities as citizens and to keep pornography out of public view, several judges opined that the Founding Fathers had given pornographers a right to pollute us and our children, a right that does not exist in the United States Constitution. They put us on a course that has almost obliterated the ideal of fidelity of body, mind, imagination and the heart, upon which marriage, family and child-rearing are built.

Nevertheless, lawyers, journalists and politicians announced that this opinion was to be the new law though it had no basis in the Constitution or in any law authorized by the American people via their chosen lawmakers.

Likewise, judges - acting on behalf of a tiny, anti-constitutional, self-styled cultural “elite” dedicated to turning America into an ideological utopia - opined that the American people may neither protect children from violent murder in their mother’s womb, nor outlaw sodomy, nor restrict their civic blessing upon marriage to nature’s definition of it, nor ensure that parentless children are placed with parents as nature defines them: one father and one mother.

Nor should I forget to mention judicial disregard for centuries of customary, legal and constitutional protection of private property in order to provide legal sanction for powerful, corrupt politicians lusting after other men’s land or buildings. “Take what you please,” they said in essence. And this was now the law. One hand washes the other.

Many of us received in shock and sadness the Goodridge v. the Department of Public Health of Massachusetts opinion on homosexual marriage. Why do self-styled “conservatives,” lawyers, politician and pundits among them, spread the assertion that judges have powers that the American people have never given them?

The truth is that the ruthlessly enforced illusion of judicial supremacy did not merely empower judges and disenfranchise the American people. It made journalists, lawyers and clever politicians more influential culturally. Most, after all, are of the same ideological bent as many judges. And those who were not, the “conservatives,” played within the new rules: judges’ opinions are the law in the United States of America.

If Americans paid attention, understood what is at stake and agreed upon the solution, their long-term strategy would require:

* an string of primary victories by candidates who fully grasp the fact that judges have no authority to change our laws and who aggressively will oppose all claims to the contrary;
* an unbroken series of triumphs by such constitutionalist candidates in general elections, year after year;
* an unbroken series of nominations of judges who will interpret the law and will reject the noxious and absurd myth that previous court opinions are “the law of the land”; (Presidents Ronald W. Reagan and George H. W. Bush gave us activists such as Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter!);
* an unbroken series of Senate confirmations of originalist judges;
* unwavering constitutionalism by originalist judges in their years on the bench, withstanding daily assault by infuriated cultural “elites” who grew accustomed to using legally void and impotent court opinions as bulldozers to deceive and enslave Americans via a-moral, anti-constitutional and increasingly tyrannical judicial delusions.

Not a single signer of the Constitution (or of the Declaration of Independence) would have taken seriously the purportedly “conservative” view today that to restrain judges we need to replace them through attrition over decades. …..

The rest is here at UndergroundJournal.net, where — unlike at Hugh Hewitt’s place (this change was made recently) — you can leave comments and are more than welcome to (as well as here at BizzyBlog for about the next two weeks.