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politics

Unashamedly liberal

I AM  TELLING YOU HOW TO VOTE

10/25/2016

1 Comment

 
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​Save this column because it applies to every federal election.  And you can probably figure out how to use at the state and local levels as well. 
 
The responsibility of every citizen at election time is to cast a vote for the candidate who, in the voter’s opinion, can best pursue the mission of the United States.  And what exactly is that mission?  Fortunately, our founders left us with two documents that make it clear: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Both speak broadly and both provide plenty of weeds to get into.  But if you want to know why we are America, you need only look to the preambles of each. 
 
In the Declaration, these words declare the purpose of the endeavor: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” 
 
And the Constitution is even clearer: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 
 
That’s the job every candidate is applying for – to advance the mission statement.  There is plenty of debate about how to accomplish the mission, but the mission itself is indisputable.  A candidate who proposes eliminating liberty, or who encourages insurrection, or who wishes to throw open our borders to hostile forces is patently unqualified to hold office.  Moreover, such a candidate does not understand that the oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution precludes opposing the Constitution. 
 
So it is simple, right?  Just vote for the candidate who pledges life, fortune and sacred honor (that’s the end of the Declaration) to the Constitution! 
 
Would that it was so simple.  Here is the essence of a conversation I had with a very wise elected official.  I am tempted to drop a name here, but the individual is “in cycle” as they say and maybe this would be perceived as electioneering. 
 
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration, was careful to say that we held certain truths to be self-evident, including that all men are created equal. But that truth never found its way into the Constitution.  Women, African-Americans and others found themselves excluded from the rights and privileges afforded to white men.  And that truth never found its way into the life of the man who declared it.  Jefferson was a slave owner and sexually active outside of marriage with women who dared not refuse him. 
 
It took three generations of the American experiment before the President of the United States could state that our nation was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Abraham Lincoln might very well have been accused of violating the three-fifths rule in the Constitution, but history validates that a commitment to anything less than full equality would not long endure.  He went about implementing the proposition. 
 
The larger values – the founding values – might rightly be used to advocate for correctives to the details.  Does gun ownership provide for the common defense or disrupt domestic tranquility?  That’s a better question than “how do we protect the Second Amendment?”  Does profiling promote the general welfare or disestablish justice?  It is on such a question the debate should center rather than on fear and indignation. 
 
But some things don’t fit so neatly into the broad categories of the mission statement.  Perhaps I believe that certain economic policies are dangerous to me and my posterity.  It could be that I see the unalienable right to life as superseding all others.  Maybe I am convinced that a particular foreign alliance has an extra-constitutional claim on my vote.  What do I do? 
 
A person who does not vote his interests is a fool.  And a person who votes only his interests is a scoundrel.  The balancing act can sometimes be uncomfortable, but, in the end, you must evaluate your vote by the same standard as the candidate.  Am I advancing the blessings of liberty that are to be vouchsafed to us and the generations to come? 
 
Agree with me?  Then get out there and vote.  Disagree with me?  Then get out there and vote.  In other words, vote, dammit. 

1 Comment
Brandon
10/25/2016 09:04:04 pm

"Does gun ownership provide for the common defense or disrupt domestic tranquility?"

Well I have a right to "Life", and in order to continue to live it may be necessary to defend said life with a gun, so wether or not it enables a common defense or helps to ensure domestic tranquility are secondary considerations under the law (don't we have a moral imperative to stay alive that supersedes man's law anyway?). Looking at it from the other direction we get the same result: I could certainly argue that many people disrupt tranquility on both a general and specific level, but does that negate their right to life? Of course not. The Founders had to fight to stay alive, which is why the amendment providing for self-defense was put at #2 on the list. Although most of us are usually one phone call away from help, if you get stuck in the aftermath of a natural disaster as I did, and you see people fighting for food and water – when you see how quickly people become animalistic – you realize why we are at the top of the food chain: humans excel at killing. Ants, for comparison, do not. They are much better at building than killing. It takes many, many ants to kill anything even though each one can carry, push, pull, and stabilize something many times their own weight. We struggle to lift something our own weight but each one of us can kill many people. So I would say there is a pretty strong argument for the right to own a gun. The strength of that argument may vary depending on where you live, but we cannot anticipate future events so we have to allow people to provide for their own defense. I don't know if that makes me a scoundrel, but if so I'd rather be alive for people to call me a scoundrel than for people to be standing over my grave saying "well, he's dead, but at least he wasn't a scoundrel." (And if it makes it more palatable, I have more to contribute to this world alive than dead.)

The order of precedence is 1. Creator 2. Individual 3. Government 4. Society. The general welfare is last on the list because the basis of the Great Experiment is individual liberty, not collective harmony.

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    Now that I am in my fifth decade of activism, I have developed some opinions.

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