The following excerpts are from a speech Mark Steyn gave at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009.  You can read the full article here.

“In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct.”

…

“And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ’s Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that’s underway. The 44th president’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can’t make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it’s about 40%. In four years’ time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.”

…

“That’s Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really? It’s unclear whether that’s really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it’s absolutely certain that it’s not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It’s ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world’s wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.

“And don’t be too sure you’ll get to choose your record collection in the end. That’s Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it’s a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone friends in the Province of Quebec used to complain about the lack of English signs in Quebec hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they’re allowed to decide the language they’ll give it in? But, as I’ve learned during my year in the hellhole of Canadian “human rights” law, that’s true in a broader sense. In the interests of “cultural protection,” the Canadian state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign TV operators, and foreign bookstore owners out of Canada. Why shouldn’t it, in return, assume the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?

“When Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled up in 2007 for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia,” it quickly became very clear that, for members of a profession that brags about its “courage” incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content to be the eunuchs in the politically correct harem. A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there’s hardly anything left that isn’t on the state dripfeed to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. Up north, “intellectual freedom” means the relevant film-funding agency—Cinedole Canada or whatever it’s called—gives you a check to enable you to continue making so-called “bold, brave, transgressive” films that discombobulate state power not a whit.

“And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as “hatred.” In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.”

MARK STEYN’S column appears in several newspapers, including the Washington Times, Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, Maclean’s in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke’s Bay Today in New Zealand.

Read the full article at http://www.hillsdale.edu/images/userImages/mvanderwei/Page_4221/ImprimisApril09.pdf

The “conservatives” on the Supreme Court have again voted in favor of big government and against liberty. They have ruled against the Fourth Amendment and in favor of the police state. (See AP report and USA Today report, “Supreme Court OKs Use of Evidence from Illegal Search.”)

For years, the courts have rightly refused to convict somebody based upon evidence that was obtained through an illegal, unconstitutional search. A legal search obeys the Fourth Amendment, which requires the search to be based upon probable cause and backed up by a warrant. The courts have gotten this one right over the years, refusing to accept evidence in court that failed to meet the criteria for a legitimate search. This way, law enforcement had an incentive to obey the Constitution, and do proper searches, rather than illegal searches.

But no more. The Fourth Amendment has been effectively repealed. Now, any the time that law enforcement makes a “mistake” that prevents them from doing a proper search, they will get away with it, and the evidence can be admitted into the court proceedings. The incentive to do the search in a legal fashion has now been removed; instead, and an incentive to do illegal searches and then say “oops” has now been introduced.

What is particularly astounding is that the reasoning of the majority had nothing to do with fidelity to the Constitution. As USA Today reports, “The Roberts majority focused on the societal costs of excluding drugs and other evidence seized.” Where did the Supreme Court derive the authority to rule based upon the perceived social costs and benefits of their decision? Aren’t these judges? …And aren’t judges supposed to interpret the law and rule based upon the Constitution? Or are they legislators now?

Conservatives rightly gripe about liberals who legislate from the bench. But they need to look in the mirror: “conservatives” have just legislated from the bench, and in doing so, have giving another tool to the police state. They have made it that much easier for the state to act in a lawless manner, further stripping the people of their individual liberties.

The American Constitution Society (ACS) has recently published a new issue brief by Geoff Stone, entitled, On Secrecy and Transparency: Thoughts for Congress and a New Administration, in which Stone argues that the Bush administration’s insistence on national security at the expense of keeping citizens, or even Congress informed, has opened the door for torture, surveillance, and even threats to prosecute members of the press for getting too close to security issues.

In order to do so, Stone argues, the administration has relied on expansive definitions of executive immunity and the state secrets doctrine. Is it an understandable response to threats of future terrorist attacks or a fundamental shift in the way the nation works?

Stone’s document is about 12 pages long, but well worth checking out.

http://www.acslaw.org/files/Geoff%20Stone%20Issue%20Brief.pdf

1. Study secretly tracks cell phone users outside US (AP)
2. Water Crisis to be Biggest World Risk (London Telegraph)
3. American Blogger Released on Bail in Singapore

Study secretly tracks cell phone users outside US (AP)

Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.

The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/04/national/a100140D77.DTL

Water Crisis to be Biggest World Risk (London Telegraph)

A catastrophic water shortage could prove an even bigger threat to mankind this century than soaring food prices and the relentless exhaustion of energy reserves, according to a panel of global experts at the Goldman Sachs “Top Five Risks” conference.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/05/ccwater105.xml

American Blogger Released on Bail in Singapore

A US-based blogger who allegedly accused a Singapore judge of “prostituting herself” was released on bail Thursday and had his passport confiscated.A judge ordered Gopalan Nair, a former Singapore lawyer who is now a US citizen, to be released on 5,000 dollars bail (3,676 US) after more than four days in custody.

A prosecutor told the court there was no need for him to be detained while further investigations were carried out.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080605082122.yhz5ise8&show_article=1

1. [iv] Lowell Bergman, “Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends,” New York Times, January 17, 2006.

By Michael D. Peabody, Esq.

Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, politicians rushed to their podiums to urge people to continue living their lives as normally as possible. If the way of life changed, politicians warned, the terrorists would have won. After the initial shock subsided, most Americans resumed their traveling, shopping, and recreation as they applauded the military response overseas.

Although people gradually stopped scanning the skies for low-flying aircraft, a panic-stricken administration decided, in the interest of national security, that the United States could no longer afford to protect certain Constitutional luxuries. Protection of due process rights, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and other liberties which may have seemed feasible in the bucolic wake of the American Revolution, could not survive the onslaught of global jihad.

The existing rules did not contemplate the existence of foreign terrorists operating within the United States to cause such excessive destruction. If the Executive Branch were to prevent future terrorist attacks, it had to find ways to do so that would not unnecessarily risk exposing its strategies in open court while also respecting Constitutional limitations. Since developing a solution that would protect national security as well as the Constitutional rights would take a long time, the administration unilaterally pursued a tactic of redefining its role in order to expand its powers while withdrawing Constitutional rights. Since the scope of the attempted expansion of executive power is unlimited, Constitutional freedoms are increasingly becoming products of executive beneficence rather than bedrocks upon which all can undeniably rely.

Soon after the attacks, the administration declared that parts of the Geneva Convention, which have protected generations of American soldiers, did not apply in the current conflict because Al Qaeda had not been a signatory to the treaty. Under this line of reasoning, the military secretly “rendered” Al Qaeda prisoners to nations that do not share Americans’ distaste for torture.

As American school children know, the founders discovered certain “inalienable rights” which were identified in the Declaration of Independence and enumerated, in part, in the Bill of Rights. As we approach the 230^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, however, the applicability of these rights is quickly disappearing under the emerging theory of the “unitary executive.”

The theory supposes that since the President has direct control over departments within the Executive Branch, Congress has little right to interfere with their actions. For instance, the Justice Department has said that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot sue to regulate the U.S. military since the executive branch would be the only party involved. In short, the unitary executive operates as one body and cannot act against itself.

Proponents of the “unitary executive” rest the theory on the Vesting Clause of Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which states, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” They then reference the Take Care clause which states “[The President] shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” They thus conclude that the Constitution creates a “hierarchical, unified executive department under the direct control of the President.”[i]

The term “unitary executive” first emerged at the Constitutional Convention where it described the concept of having a single President as opposed to a committee. Several of the framers expressed the concern that, in contrast with contemporary monarchs, executive power should be checked and restrained by the legislature and the judiciary.

Until recently, few presidents explored the contours of their executive authority. Abraham Lincoln recognized his limits in 1861 when he asked that Congress retroactively pass a law to authorize his executive suspension of the writ of habeus corpus, which had frozen due process rights for suspected Confederates.

During World War II, when Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent, his administration submitted to Judicial review in establishing the correctness of his decision. His action stood only because the Supreme Court approved the action, a decision that subsequent justices have regretted.[ii]

In 1970, one of Richard Nixon’s aides, Tom Charles Huston responding to countercultural groups in the United States, drafted a plan for wiretapping, burglary, and opening the mail of suspected domestic radicals. Although Nixon ratified the “Huston Plan,” he withdrew it under pressure. However, Nixon did attempt to use executive power sufficient to impede the investigations of campaign staffers who had approved the unlawful Watergate break-ins. Nixon resigned before his claimed extension of authority could be tested in court.

In 1978, Congress, concerned about the growing levels of executive surveillance and alleged abuses by the National Security Agency, passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA contained procedures for physical and electronic surveillance of American groups believed to be backed by a foreign government. It was later enhanced by the USA PATRIOT Act to include terrorist groups not specifically backed by foreign countries.

On September 11, 2001, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, which had been at least partially planned and organized within the United States, propelled the issue of domestic surveillance to the forefront, and along with it, the issue of the unitary executive.

In response to these attacks, John Yoo, now a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, provided much of the framework for the modern theory of the unitary executive. During his work in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, Yoo wrote memos that supported the legality of torture, and narrowed definitions of the habeus corpus requirements. Yoo further stated that the President has the power to interpret international treaties, such as the Geneva Convention, and that such interpretation is “a key feature of the conduct of foreign affairs.”[iii] He further argued that only nations who were signatories to the Convention could be protected by its provisions.

The theory of the unitary executive is deeply imbedded in the administration’s current approach to the issue of terrorism. When a whistleblower told the New York Times about the existence of a wiretapping program directed at American citizens, the administration sidestepped the issue of the program’s legality under FISA or legal precedent, and instead condemned both the Times and the whistleblower for endangering national security. The administration argued that it could do whatever it wanted to do in order to ensure the safety of Americans, and was not beholden to any law on the topic.

Although the wiretapping began in earnest soon after the September 2001 attack, the administration denied it. In an April 2004 speech, President Bush said, “any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order.” Then, in December 2005, soon after warrantless wiretaps became public, Bush said that the program was “limited” to “taking known al-Qaeda numbers – numbers from known al-Qaeda people – and just trying to find out why the phone calls are being made.”

Although FISA has a provision allowing 72 hours of wiretapping before going to a secret court for a warrant, the administration did not operate under those guidelines. Instead, the administration authorized the NSA to examine huge numbers of phone calls and e-mails. In fact, so much information was surreptitiously obtained that, according to the New York Times, “FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. . . . Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.”[iv] Even FBI director, Robert S. Mueller III, asked whether the eavesdropping had an appropriate legal foundation, and ultimately deferred to the Justice Department’s position.[v]

In a 42-page legal analysis in defense of the wiretapping program dated January 19, 2006, the Justice Department stated that the USA PATRIOT Act and the congressional authorization to use force against the September 11, 2001 terrorists, “places the president at the zenith of his powers” and grants authority, not only internationally, but also domestically.

According to this memo, the Congressional authority is now vested in the President on issues of the war on terrorism, and that “the president has made clear that he will exercise authority available to him, consistent with the Constitution, to protect the people of the United States.”

The phrase “consistent with the Constitution” is troubling since the same memo argues that the president, whose is at his highest power, can override constitutional protections to execute the War on Terror. Since this war has no established tactical goal other than the eradication of global terrorism, it can be expected to last indefinitely, setting the standard, not only for the short term, but conceivably for the remainder of history. It will be difficult for the citizenry to reassert those rights which fall as casualties to the unitary executive.

The Founders forged this nation, not on the force of agreement or edict, but on a discovery – that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. These rights emerged, not from a king or prelate, but from a far greater power, far surpassing the highest reaches of any human authority.

James Madison had such a high regard for these rights that he viewed the very act of naming them as dangerous to nascent Constitutional freedoms. Madison, in fact, went on record in opposition to including the Bill of Rights in the Constitution because he feared that in the future, a governing element might legalistically limit the rights of its citizens to those listed, and deny the existence of rights that had been inadvertently overlooked or had not yet risen to prominence.

The concept of the unitary executive ignores the delicate framework of the Republican form of government in which free men and women are willing to cede a portion of their right to self-determination in exchange for a degree of safety, but are protected by a Legislature that passes laws based on the desire of the majority, an Executive that acts upon those laws, and a Judiciary which remains the guardian of the pre-existing natural rights.

In a speech honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. given on January 16, 2006, former Vice President Al Gore warned, “As the Executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.”

The transformation from a republic based on the concept of “inalienable rights” of the citizens to a nation that depends upon the unitary power of the Executive which has risen in response to terrorism, may not yet affect the everyday lives of most Americans. However, though life may appear the same on the surface, if left unchecked, the emerging dominance of one branch over the others will undermine the rights of citizenship.

[i] Calabresi & Rhodes (1992). “The Structural Constitution: Unitary Executive, Plural Judiciary”. Harvard Law Review 105:1565.

[ii] It is of note that the Supreme Court has never overturned the expansion of governmental wartime powers established in Korematsu v. United States (1944). The internment cases have taken on added relevance in the context of the current War on Terror.

[iii] See Interview with John Yoo. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/960315in.html

[iv] Lowell Bergman, “Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends,” New York Times, January 17, 2006.

[v] Ibid.

In the book, 1984, George Orwell paints a bleak portrait of a future where Big Brother is watching everything you do, and the thought police can practically read your mind. In order to gain the support of the population, an ironically named Ministry of Truth twists the meaning of words to make terrible concepts seem acceptable with slogans such as War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; and Ignorance is Strength.
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<!–[endif]–>In 2005, there may not be an American Ministry of Truth, but in recent years the words that we used to describe our freedoms have been redefined to mean very different things.

For Adventists, the concept of religious liberty has long been defined as the God-given right of each and every person to practice his or her religion, or no religion at all. Liberty Magazine, now in its 100^th year, has steadfastly promoted this definition. Yet some others have loosely defined the term “religious liberty” as the freedom to impose a certain brand of religion on the government, and ultimately, on its citizens.

And while the vast majority of American Christians rally under the banner of ”religious liberty,” a recent study found that many would limit the freedom of those with differing beliefs. The study, commissioned by Cornell University, found that 42% of highly religious American Christians believe that Muslim Americans should register their whereabouts with the government, and nearly 44% of all respondents believed that the government should limit the civil rights of Muslims, including profiling individual citizens based on being Muslim, monitoring Mosques, and infiltrating Muslim civic and volunteer organizations. Perhaps most troubling, the study found that the more religious somebody claimed to be, the more likely they were to favor curtailing the civil liberties of Muslims.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–>

This emerging lack of tolerance is not unforeseen given the shear volume of fear that followed the attacks of 9/11, but as these sentiments reach critical mass, there are striking implications for people who may find themselves outside the orbit of fundamentalist Christianity even though it envisions itself championing “religious liberty.”

As Martin Luther King, Jr. eloquently stated, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” When the liberties of other religious groups are threatened, ours are too.

History “where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–> has borne out the results of political, religious, and cultural intolerance in the blood of millions and demands our continual vigilance as we navigate through this precarious time.

Orwell’s fictional concept of the future is over 20 years past due, but at the end of the day, terms such as “liberty” and “freedom,” remain fragile concepts, finding their interpretation only through the language of the culture. It is up to us to break through the confusion and demonstrate what true religious liberty looks like.

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Michael D. Peabody, a practicing attorney, is Associate Director of the Public Affairs and Religious Liberty department of the Pacific Union Conference.

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<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–> See MSRG Special Report: Restrictions on Civil Liberties, Views of Islam, and of Muslim Americans. http://www.comm.cornell.edu/msrg/report1a.pdf. Released December 17, 2004.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–> Philip Roth, “The Plot Against America,” Houghton Miflin, 2004. p. 114.

inst America,” Houghton Miflin, 2004. p. 114.