“Observations”©

by: Donald S. Conkey

 

Date: December 13, 2007 - # 950 - December 15, 1791 - Bill of Rights (805)

 

What is significant about December 15? It is a day Americans often don’t remember but should. It was 216 years ago on December 15, 1791 that America’s Bill of Rights were ratified. They were the first ten amendments to America’s new Constitution. These were the “unalienable rights” the Founding Fathers wanted as part of their Constitution, but which some feel today are being slowly watered down and destroyed by recent court decisions. How America obtained its Bill of Rights is an interesting story, a story few know today because it is seldom taught anymore.

Today it is the small minority, even single individuals, those that successful mock God and America’s God based culture that grabs the headlines. These individuals are successfully removing from government the religious and moral values America was founded upon as they work to remove God, or the influence of God, from every aspect of government, especially from the nation’s schools.

I recently read a statement by Gordon B. Hinckley that every individual who cherishes freedom should ponder. Said he: “… It is so obvious that the great good and the terrible evil in the world today are the sweet and the bitter fruits of the rearing of yesterday’s children. As we train a new generation, so will the world be in a few years. If you are worried about the future, then look to the upbringing of your children. …”

These are crucial times in America’s history. Jefferson wrote about our day in the Declaration of Independence, writing “... and accordingly all Experience has shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. 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, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. ...”

And where are today’s historians, those whose job it is to remind America of what happened when other nations, using the same methods being used to destroy America today, self-destructed from within. Will Durant in “The Story of Civilization” named the nations who fell when the few were successful in taking over the government by using their own constitutions to gain power, then subdued the people through fear and intimidation into silence.

In 1933 Hitler gained control of Germany using the democratic process. Once in power his Nazi government intimidated the people, nearly destroyed their Jewish citizens, and by May 1945 had succeeded in totally destroying the German nation, leaving its people devastated. It continues to happen in our generation: in Iraq, Iran, and other nations, including Cuba. Could it happen here in America? Have the federal courts, by ignoring the principles established by the founding fathers, put their stamp of approval on this madness?  No nation has ever survived after ignoring what Jefferson referred to as the two foundational laws of liberty; the “laws of Nature” and the “laws of Nature’s God.” After removing these laws from their culture dictators, using corrupt laws, subdued the people through fear into submission.

Jefferson also wrote in the Declaration of Independence “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ...” Note Jefferson’s emphasis on the word Creator. He capitalized it. Was Jefferson being insensitive? In today’s world Jefferson would have been “politically incorrect” and threatened with a lawsuit by the ACLU. Jefferson knew, as do 90 percent of all Americans, that America’s rights are dependent upon the mercy of the “laws of Nature,” and on the “laws of Nature’s God” – Jefferson’s God.

This takes us back to 1787when 39 men signed the new Constitution of the United States. What history books often leave out is that three Founding Fathers refused to sign that Constitution – George Mason, Elbridge Gerry, and Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph.